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Comment by jpmc | Hacker News Reader

I have found that the "power users" are moving towards multiple monitors and fill a single screen with a browser.

I've got 1920x1200 + 2*1600x1200 pixels. Maximizing even on one of my "small" monitors would be a waste. Also, wide layouts are hard to read.

I'm also always doing several things at once, so I'll tend to fill up one browser window with tabs related to one topic, then launch off on another tangent and fill more browser windows with more tabs. And that's just on one of my 9 virtual desktops. So having only one browser window visible makes it hard to keep track of what window has what information.

My usage pattern is not typical.

Yes that's what I do. I want to see as much as possible without having to scroll. And I set up one monitor in portrait mode for working with documents or pages that are tall and narrow.

But then you don't get sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and on the very monitor where you do most of your reading.

Why not?

The sub-pixels are physically oriented horizontally normally; if you flip your monitor, they become vertically oriented, and most OSs/font renderers aren't set up to do sub-pixel antialiasing in the vertical direction, so they just disable it. It might not be much of a win to do it, either, since it'd just be giving you more effective resolution along the height of letters, which isn't usually the direction most in need of it.

Nonetheless, I think that's a small price to pay for being able to fit a vertical PDF on a monitor nicely.

Windows 7 does sub-pixel antialiasing in either monitor orientation. Looks fine to me.

I have multiple monitors but I really dislike having a web browser at full screen. I always run it windowed.

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