> Humans are good at reading columns at around roughly 80 characters
Depends. The reason why it may seem better to have narrow column is so you can skip ahead more easily and thus read faster (reason why newspaper divide an article into columns). Otherwise it doesn't make difference.
To me it's absurd that this day the trend is to have wide screen displays (16:9 but nowadays even 21:9 is common) and then all the text is vertical in a column that makes it impossible to read.
I prefer to give the use a choice: after all if the user prefers narrow text all he has to do is to take the mouse and resize the browser window at the width that he likes! But doing the opposite is not possible (at least without an extension that modifies CSS), and thus you have to keep scrolling something that otherwise would have fitted in a single screen.
The problem with your preferred solution is that it requires changing the window width for each web page. My web IRC client requires a somewhat wide window, since it has a sidebars of channels on the left and a sidebar of users on the right, both of which provide utility and I don't want to hide. Reddit is unreadable on narrow screens. But blogs would need an 80 column window (I.e 1/4 the width of the screen) to be comfortable, unless the blog has some sidebar which makes that too narrow. I don't know about you, but I switch between tabs frequently, and I'm extremely happy that I don't have to resize my browser for every tab switch.
I keep my browser window maximised (usually on a secondary screen). I like that all web pages are more or less readable in that configuration.
Depends. The reason why it may seem better to have narrow column is so you can skip ahead more easily and thus read faster (reason why newspaper divide an article into columns). Otherwise it doesn't make difference.
To me it's absurd that this day the trend is to have wide screen displays (16:9 but nowadays even 21:9 is common) and then all the text is vertical in a column that makes it impossible to read.
I prefer to give the use a choice: after all if the user prefers narrow text all he has to do is to take the mouse and resize the browser window at the width that he likes! But doing the opposite is not possible (at least without an extension that modifies CSS), and thus you have to keep scrolling something that otherwise would have fitted in a single screen.