My guess is that they want some "white space" on the page so that it's not visually overwhelming. Pages that are nothing but text/graphics with little space in between can be tough to look at. You're right, though, such a huge area does decrease the amount of the site that's visible "above the fold".

or a slow advertising day. rent has to be paid somehow.

...it is not like we are using 14" monitors any more where space really was at a premium...

I'm using a 24" monitor and space is STILL at a premium.

(As far as browsers go, I wish my browser had a simple "remove the frame" button, so I could get the content within the frame)

I prefer open spaces and simplicity. Probably just a matter of taste, but most web design sites tend to advise against packing things too closely or overloading the page.

Same feelings here!

As far as I am concerned most pages here are CR4 are way to clutterd with junk and at least 1/4 of it could disapear and I wouldn't mind it one bit.

I agree about wasting band width. Otherwise, the moving videos that sometimes distract me are an aggravation more than anything else.

But, if we really, really wanted to conserve bandwidth, _{we kud al uz txtspk}.

You mean like this (the area outside the red box)?

I actually like it! Simple is better (at least for my eyes now) and virtual real estate is cheap.

I don't have a problem with google, since the important part of the website, the keywords box, is right there centered on the screen. So, clean and simple for the rest of the page is OK with me. If you notice with Yahoo, they've filled up the rest of their screen with adverts. Which is also OK by me, since I usually just ignore them.

I guess my biggest pet peeve is with the map pages, since I'd like to be able to fill the screen of my monitor with the map, but have to put up with nearly a third of the screen (needlessly) unusable for my needs. If I want to print a paper map (yeah, I know, so last century) I have to cut and paste one together.

I suppose once I get a smart phone with a map app this problem will go away. I'll just have to get used to doing lots of scrolling on a map the size of a credit card.

I see what yopu mean with the map pages. The weather sites I go to, I always have to search for a while to get what I want, which is annoying in itself, let alone having to zoom/scroll/resize to get what you want. Ptoooey!

My biggest peeve with websites is the ones with advertising that, before you can scroll/navigate on the page, all of the adverts have to finish loading. Oh, and the ones where all you have to do is (accidentally) scroll over a link, and it activates.

So much free space for advertising crappy products we don't want, so much gratitude to Google for not doing it.

More white space please, i don't want it to look like some tabloid magazine

I might be spoilt with mapping.

We paid the licence fees and get full screen image rather than the "freeware" version. I can even compress the tool bar at left if I want to print.

Can select overlay of railways, rivers, road reserves, land use type, contours, road names, road surfaces, and aerial pictures. We can select a location on our overhead maps and then directly go to "street view" if we want.

Our picture layer has pixel size around 10cm, so we can see most of what we need.

Also, the printed maps usually show an extra 5% outside what's on screen on each edge.

^{. if the writing was half this size, I think this would piss me off even more}

Let me add my pet peeves:

1) You print out from a website. Far too frequently the last page has virtually nothing on it - just a title or tiny piece of irrelevant drivel. Waste of 1 piece of paper.

2) You print an article. The word at the beginning or end of line is truncated. You may lost 1-2 words on the end. Why? Highlighting and printing "selection" does not help.

3) You try to highlight an area in an e-mail to copy or "print selection." The computer will not allow it - sometimes. No explanation for it.

I frequently have to copy and paste (if I can) into WORD to get a decent print. It shouldn't be necessary. Using Windows 7.

P.S. McAfee is completely and utterly useless as an antivirus. $50 for nothing. Thank you Dell.

Tell me the Today's web programmers are not idiots** & i "buy that"

there are some things i can figure out while some others i cant

(1) the not web optimized multimedia - is due low site dev. budget - so the ones with huge screen resolution and ultra fast internet connection - can have all the pleasure out of the money wasted to top notch Hi-Tech WEB X-perience

... chk the underscores this combination is ... normal

(2) with the higger site dev. budget you CAN support the multitude of browsers , whitch demands very speciffic and exhaustive script library (it might not initialize/work with all client hw combinations)

(3) !!!! each end user must scan everithing to be virus/worm free before they can see it (IT'S TOTALLY INAPLICABLE SUCH CONTENT AND SORCES ARE CONTINUOSLY TRACKED REMOVED BY BY GLOBAL SERVICES - or the speciffic website can receive for an 1h ??? "Secure" Cert. when 500 000 users have scanned it ????)

(4) the blank area is where the LOGO usually stands (? google constantly improves that item (varying space demands(this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank this page is intentionally left blank )))