spherebox

With media these days being produced and released in widescreen formats, it’s not surprising that most people would choose a widescreen LCD over a normal aspect ratio LCD (notice the fat black bands at the top and bottom of your screen?). This switch was further accelerated with widescreen LCD prices offered at relatively competitive prices which apparently is due to cost savings in manufacturing.

A widescreen LCD is excellent for watching widescreen format media such as TV series, movies, application development IDEs, but the same doesn’t apply to browsing the web.

Due to the plethora of cross-browser issues, many web designers/developers have resorted to restricting the width of web pages to 800 pixels which is somewhat the minimum resolution which most users displays has been set to. As such, opening these web pages end up with a lot of blank wasted space on the left and right of the content on widescreen LCDs.

One way of getting around this is to have 2 browsers open side by side like this:

To get to that state, you would have to resize each window to fit half of the screen besides positioning it. Fortunately, there is an add-on (extension) called Split Browser which enables a single Firefox window to be split up to house multiple tabs. Screenshot of it in action:

Instead of 2 separate Firefox windows, they’re both tabs within one.

Opera users would probably be pointing out that this capability is already built into the standard Opera browser, but I guess this entry is targeted towards Firefox users who would like to have this ‘feature’ without having to switch to another browser. ;)