[yan]

My WebKit hack from two years ago that splits the rendering area into N joined columns, such that you scroll content Up->Down->Left->Right.

https://vimeo.com/59463521

The intuition was that screens are almost all wide-screen, but content is all narrow, due to readability. This was an attempt to add a mode to browsers that can let you use more of your screen real estate.

I have a draft of a blog post from a year ago explaining my reasoning and a diff of the hack, but I kept putting it off. If people are interested, I'll port it to Blink and write something up about this.

[tomek_zemla]

It's an interesting concept and intuitively it might seem desirable to fit in more text/information on the screen, but after some thought I think it would diminish user experience.

The supporting arguments come from the principles of graphic design and book publishing. Digital screens are very much evolution of print. Two examples. Think of the well designed art books or hard covers. Large pages with significant areas taken by blank margins. This is easier and more pleasant to look at. Cheap pulp fiction paperbacks on the other hand had little margin space. Second example is the latest redesign of the digital version of the New York Times. It takes advantage of the fact that having blank/white pixels is free in comparison to unused spaces in the print edition and many changes were aimed at reducing number of items on each page not increasing.

So in my humble opinion it's an interesting experiment, but in the wrong direction...

[Renaud]

That view seems a bit restrictive. There are cases where having more on screen is useful and actually helps readability, in particular for technical and scientific documentation.

Reading an article or a story is pretty much a linear activity: you progress onward and never have to go backward. In that case, readability is very much influenced by a page layout that reduces noise.

For other types of documentation, the surroundings of what you are reading are important, and having to actually move the page up/down or flip pages on a book makes you easily loose context.

So maybe this n-column reflow is not for everything or everyone, but if it was an option available in my browser, I know I would use it quite often.

Another thing to note: newspapers and magazines have multiple columns of text, and they are still very readable. So that n-column layout in a browser might not even be bad for reading articles on website that don't have busy side panels.

[tomek_zemla]

Agreed. Context/content makes a big difference... I guess the idea is similar to having multiple panes of IDE open with different sections of the same file.