Widescreen narrowness

There has been a trend for a few years now for computer screens to become widescreen. The move to widen TVs to promote "home cinema" and the advent of the DVD film format was re-applied to the business of selling PCs. So the theory was that you could watch a DVD without black bars being shown top and bottom. For a while business orientated machines stuck with the old 4:3 aspect screens, but it was only a matter of time before it became uneconomical to produce screens with anything other than 16:10 ratio. So now the merry-go-round has come round again and PC screens are appearing with 16:9 aspect ratio to satisfy the demands of the entertainment industry again, this time for blu-ray. Our screens are getting ever more like letterboxes. 

Now you might think that all the other stuff you use a PC for would have been adapted for wide screens. Well let's look at the most popular activity, web browsing. The vast majority of websites out there have no concept of scaling to screen dimensions and most resort to being a fixed width. So on a wider monitor you end up with a strip of content in the centre bordered with acres of space either side. Crazy. So in effect, what has been done for entertainment has taken away from normal everyday stuff. It gets worse, compare a normal aspect screen with the wide equivalent and you'll find there are less pixels in the latter! On the other hand resolutions are soaring, with 22 inch monitors now the norm. If that trend continues then it won't matter too much how wide they are, you won't need to have things take up the whole screen anyway.