Does this browser make us look fat?
| Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 | --Sean |
Maybe it's the free sodas or our typical choice of foosball instead of soccer, but there's no denying that Yahoo! is getting wider. The Turin Olympics site, the Oscars site, Yahoo! Tech, and even the main Yahoo! page...all of them have made the leap to 1024 by 768 pixels. Driving this expansion is the fact that the large majority of our users are browsing at resolutions higher than 800x600, which had been our standard for years, and hey, it's never good to waste space.
Still, everyone likes to slim down once in a while. On the Yahoo! home page, you can do this by visiting the Page Options menu (inexplicably at the top right of the page...oh well) and clicking on the Switch to narrow layout link. Suddenly, we're a svelte 800 pixels wide and ready to accommodate all of your narrow browsing needs.
Fine, you might have known about that one already. What may surprise you, however, is that we can bulk up pretty well, too. Kind of like Barry Bonds. If you increase your default font size (Ctrl-+ in Firefox, View->Text Size in IE), the size of the entire page increases along with it, finally allowing you to proudly display the Yahoo! home page on your 7680x4800 monitor without reservation.