Sadly, most websites forcefully limit the width of the text. It's like they pretend our monitors are oriented to be tall rather than wide. Even HN has unnecessarily big margins. So unless I try to cram another window in my FHD monitor, I have ~50% or more completely wasted space. Margins should be 2-3 pixels wide, not 20-30% of the screen.
The major difference is that in the era of print, it was pretty logical where a multicolumn wide layout could go like on a newspaper, but in an desktop experience the browser markup is theoretically endless.
> actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read
That may apply to most people, but not to everyone.
margins to control the width of large blocks of text have a ton of research in their favor, it's not just "more whitespace = more gooder" UI design madness. there's some of that of course, but there's a sane core underneath it all.
Have you looked over the shoulder of somebody trying to "do" something on their phone recently?
If so you might have noticed the constant pings and notifications from dating apps, news sites, random games and cool-apps-that-you've-long-forgotten-but-still-have-location-and-background-services-turned-on.
I noticed this only recently - I switched the default phone launcher to a scifi theme built on Total Launcher (there's legit personal research project reasons behind that, it's not just to look cool!) and after few days (and a bunch of missed messages), I realized my life seems suspiciously light in interruptions and random events. It took me a few more moments to pin-point the reason: the theme hid the notification bar entirely. It was still there, ready to pull down and expand with a gesture or a button tap - but that top line with icons was not visible (and through the stroke of luck, I misconfigured something in another experiment and had no notification indicators on the lock screen, either).
Not having notification indicators visible on any surface is really all it took - and conversely, this means that just having them there created the majority of the burden for me. I thought I successfully solved the distraction problem by silencing or eliminating ads and useless notifications, but now I know that even the important ones aren't really that important for the burden their very existence creates.
Modes control which people and apps can trigger a sound/vibration, but also offer the option to hide the silenced notifications from the status bar, pull-down shade, and dots on app icons. I hide them from the status bar, but not the pull-down shade so that I can manually check if I want to, but don't see them at a glance.
I'm not a heavy user of this feature though; I mostly don't install apps that have spammy notifications.
As a millennial boomer, I prefer my triple monitor setup and mechanical keyboard, not to mention network- and client-level content blockers, whenever I have to input more than a sentence.
I was at a conference last week, and I took notes in a fullscreened GNU Nano. Distractions, ADHD, etc. Did get some odd looks, but I couldn't imagine taking notes without an actual keyboard. I'm not an ultra fast typer, but I'm decent - I'd challenge any thumb typer on MonkeyType.
That's only for reading though! For taking notes I go with a real keyboard or pencil and paper whenever I have the choice.
browsing is slowly reducing as time goes on too, as while it's convenient on my phone, it's rarely efficient. it doesn't take long at all before I'd rather pull out a laptop and finish more quickly.