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Comment by waboremo | Hacker News Reader

There isn't wasted space. The left supports the table of contents, which can get quite long and layered. Plus it also supports the expanding top menu button. The right side can be expanded on by clicking the square button at the bottom if you're not a fan of the "narrow" reading mode.

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I don't see any square button. 2/3rds of the horizontal real estate of my screen is empty... it's wasted space.

This might look ok on a smaller monitor, but on 4K it is very sparse.

The button is at the bottom of the screen to the right. Visit an example page [1], and it should be there at the very bottom right corner. It is set to only appear on wide screens (1600px+), where the "wasted space" can actually be utilized.

Seems being directly linked to pages doesn't show the new design sometimes if you aren't logged in. But I'll provide the page where they talk about the new theme itself and the expand button [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Antiguan_general_election

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022#How_to_e...

Thanks, I see it now. I thought I looked everywhere but I missed it.

I wasn't expecting any controls to be outside the main grey area, so it's a bit weird the content width button is placed where it is. Also, I wonder if defaulting to wide mode when a wide monitor is detected is a better choice.

Either way, I don't have a strong opinion on whether its an improvement or regressive. Pretty much everything nowadays seems to be converging on a narrow column of text.

Maybe we aren't seeing the same things, To the left of the table of contents there is a lot of wasted space still. and to the right there is even more wasted space.

Navigating is also slow, it takes a second to scroll down, while before it was instantaneous.

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