> I, the user, can already control the content width by resizing my browser, thank you very much.
Nearly every techie and non-techie I know has a bazillion tabs open 100% of the time. The likelihood that even the top 10 are all single-column text is 0%. And I'd sooner read web pages hot off a dot matrix printer than constantly pecking at the edge of an un-maximized window, resizing it like some kind of meth-addled chicken.
The art of opening windows instead of tabs appears to have been lost to time.
Oh the irony that lots complain that mainstream OSes window managers are oh so poor when all people seem to be able to do is fullscreen everything and then tab around.
Meanwhile, macOS gave up on the absolutely brilliant if misunderstood Mac OS X green + a.k.a "zoom" which would miraculously resize windows to the maximum size of its content but no more.
It's almost like window management is primarily being used for facilitating inter-app interactions, rather than intra-app interactions... almost like tabs were invented for a reason...
Did people lose the old art, or have you never managed to grasp the "new" one?
I really wish mobile browsers had windows (true windows that could be switched easily, not the weird crap where you go into a submenu to find the list of windows and try to figure out which one has your tab, and Firefox doesn't even have that). I would love to split up my browsing into multiple workspaces on my large tablet, but instead I get to have four browsers installed.
I think a big reason it's lost to time is because it was poorly-specified and therefore a non-portable art.
E.g., there's no way for you to easily send me the desktop state of the open window sizes and dimensions you have in mind. And even then, I'd have to hack the window decorations and fonts myself. I'm back to meth-addled chicken pecking!
Nearly every techie and non-techie I know has a bazillion tabs open 100% of the time. The likelihood that even the top 10 are all single-column text is 0%. And I'd sooner read web pages hot off a dot matrix printer than constantly pecking at the edge of an un-maximized window, resizing it like some kind of meth-addled chicken.
Note: I may be overstating slightly for effect.