Do Widescreen Monitors Hamper Productivity?

The bigger-is-better attitude is rarely debated when discussing monitor sizes, but not everyone is in love with the trend towards widescreen monitors. What if all that width is largely wasted?

Rafe Needleman, a contributor at the gadget blog Crave, has this to say about wide-screen monitors:

Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line). What happens with modern "stretchy" sites or apps that let the user read text in a widescreen format where line lengths get long? Pages get tiring or hard to read.

He goes on to note that many arguments supporting widescreen monitors are based on the benefit of putting two applications side by side on the same monitor, but that most monitors have a fairly small number of vertical pixels and that it's a poor compromise. Certainly the number of tips we've shared on how to make your widescreen more functional—making Google reader widescreen, optimizing Firefox for widescreen, and how to micromanage your widescreen, to name a few—shows that widescreen monitors definitely require a little tweaking and adaptation to hit their productivity stride. But are widescreen monitors really as unproductive as Needleman suggests? Sound off in the comments below about your unholy love for or deep frustration with your widescreen monitor. Photo by Timothy J.