I'm not prepared to resize my window as I switch between tabs.

I'm not really complaining, I just wanted to point out how little styling was needed to massively improve readability.

Understood, I upvoted your message. The different preferences between sites -- and tabs -- is the biggest nuisance for me too, but not too big a nuisance.

You don't have resize commands bound to the keyboard? Windows ships with these, Mac and Linux have free programs that do them well.

Out of curiosity, do you use OSX? I am mainly a Windows user, which lends itself very well to full-sized windows. But whenever I use Mac, I find myself using smaller windows. Might also be related to resolution/retina displays.

Linux, with a tiling window manager. :-) You could say that it favors strongly both cases: running windows full-screen and also running a 70% window with say two 15% windows.

Windows 10, which I use in work, has this annoying habit that if I maximize browser for a webapp that requires (benefits from) more screen estate, it doesn't always restore to the earlier size correctly. But it's something I can live with.

I have the opposite, or at least on my Macbook I have everything full screen. Every program I run I use full screen, and therefore has its own virtual desktop. It gives me a lot more screen real estate without the menu bar on the top and the dock on the bottom.

A computer screen connected to the Internet already has ridiculous distraction potential, seeing multiple windows simultaneously makes it even worse.

I run low-distraction windows or even just show the desktop next to my half-a-screen browser.

What's uncomfortable about browsing with a full-size window? I usually find it slightly more painful not to have the browser maximized.

I have found it generally very uncomfortable because a vast majority of content on the web doesn't scale well vertically. You keep a wide window, you get way too long paragraphs that are hard to read as your eyes jump between the lines and whatnot. I've seen a couple excellent designs that do new columns as content comes, and there's only vertical scrolling. The columns are like 40-60 chars in width, as they should be. It's nice, accommodates the today's wide screens super well. But a majority of sites, HN included, are way wide for content if I browsed them in a 1920x1080 viewport.

HN specifically, if I have serious reading to do in the comment section, I might narrow my browser down to 600px for even better readibility.

Fair enough. I'm accustomed to reading 200 character lines, so I guess I don't notice as much. Making the window narrower to force the lines to wrap at 40 or 60 chars feels constricting/claustrophobic to me, and I'm not a big fan of the sites that display text in a thin column, about 1/3 the width of the screen.

There were a few years that I configured my work machine to have dual monitors in portrait mode. That helped my feeling of constriction, while giving shorter lines of text. As a bonus, it matched pretty closely to the 1280 width (at 1200 pixels), and often allowed more of the text to be shown at once.