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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

"The navigation bar, the search box and the search options sidebar have a fixed position"

I see this as "the revenge of designers" -- having anything permanently taking up the vertical space was pushed from "designers" for years and it always reduced usability for me. I'd prefer to see the results, not immense fixed space that doesn't contain anything. The picture is telling -- the permanent menu bar and the huge empty space around the search box and logo.

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I despise frames. And let's call these fixed elements what they really are: frames. In addition to reducing the usable screen area (which is awful on my netbook's 1024x600 screen)[1], frames also break the page metaphor. Part of what makes the web easy to use is that interacting with each website works more or less the same. That is to say, the scrolling behaviour of web pages mimics a real-life piece of paper. If the entire website no longer scrolls as one uniform page, when visiting a new site, the scrolling behaviour is unpredictable with each site doing something different. My terminology is clumsy, but perhaps it is clear enough to understand what I mean.

[1] http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/1748/screenwaste.png

Have you got a second picture showing how it would be better?

This is the gist of it. http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/4007/screenwaste2.png

Okay: so going full screen with F11 would get you half way there.

It would be interesting if spoofing your user-agent would get you the other half of the way.

A reminder: you can use Alt to bring up the menu bar if you hide it.

If you're using TabMixPlus, there may be an add-on that gives you better performance.

Would you design for the 90% or the 10%? While it sucks that your experience is diminished on a netbook with a small browser viewport (which can be helped if you were to switch to Chrome instead of Firefox), this is only a problem for a very small percentage of the user-base with tiny screens. The rest get a very pleasant and improved site experience.

Does it suck for those in the ever-decreasing minority? Yep. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

> this is only a problem for a very small percentage of the user-base with tiny screens

No, it's not. http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

I would design for both of your made up demographics. And in both cases I would preserve the page metaphor by not using frames.

Perhaps they can try another pattern (now seen on TechCrunch.com). Initially, the logo/header is sized normally. As you scroll down to the point where the header would disappear, it shrinks to a smaller height. Seems weird at first, but makes a whole lot of sense.

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