I don't entirely agree but I can see the appeal of forcing decisions on ignorant people. Someone might want their browser as wide as possible while favoring sites with narrowed content and not even realize why they like the content in a narrow format.
I'm spending a great deal of time with a colleague who has significant visual impairments and who, while a domain expert in their own areas, is neither particularly proficient with computer technology nor do they wish to be (there are certain prerogatives which come with age).
Hiding tools for compensating for poor accessibility design behind small, faint, hard-to-see, only-sometimes-visible, and/or other graphical elements is sheer madness.
Case in point: recent builds of Firefox have a "reader mode" feature, which I use heavily (my own visual capabilities are largely intact, but, well, 99.99966% of Web design is crap).
The icon:
1. Is faint.
2. Appears at a corner of the navigation box. E.g., it's not at a Fitts point (top of screen, corner).
3. Worst and most unforgivably: it only appears AFTER a page has fully loaded, doesn't appear on all pages, and cannot be specified as a default (e.g., always open pages in Readability mode, unless broken).
From a UI/UX standpoint for someone who is already visually disabled this is unforgivable.
(Yes, I've submitted feedback to Mozilla on this.)
Of course. Developers are the ones who always say "just configure it to your liking." It's the normal folk who need sane defaults!
Slightly more seriously, maybe the sane default should be a sane window size for the browser. Not everything needs to be fullscreen. Or maybe the browser window could be wide but could present a narrower viewport in appropriate circumstances. There has to be something better than having every web site separately specify whatever it thinks is a reasonable reading width.
