Habits the browser taught you · habit 06 of 40

Making the browser comfortable

The window opens at an odd size, the text is small, there is no ad blocker and the theme is not the one you like. Every one of those is worth ten seconds to fix.

What it does everywhere else

Customising software is not vanity, it is how people work well. A comfortable window size reduces eye strain over a long session, zoom makes small text readable, an extension removes something that genuinely gets in the way, and a theme reduces glare at night. Everywhere else these choices are private in the only sense that matters, which is that nobody derives anything from them.

What it does on this one

Here they are the material the browser was built to hide. A page can read the size of the area it is drawn into, can observe what the page looks like after add ons have modified it, and can measure differences in how the machine renders. Each adjustment narrows the set of browsers a given visitor could be from a very large number toward a small one.

The habit

You adjust the browser until it fits you, because a tool that fits badly is a tool that gets used badly.

Why it is automatic

Every piece of software people use for long stretches gets adjusted. Chairs, keyboards, editors and browsers all get shaped to their owner, and doing so is correct. Nobody has ever been told that changing a font size was a security decision, because in every other context it is not one, and it will not become one.

The browser encourages it as well. Settings screens are prominent, extension stores are one click away, and zoom is bound to a shortcut that gets used by accident. Some of the adjustments are not even deliberate. Dragging a window to a comfortable size is not experienced as configuration, it is experienced as putting a window where you want it.

The specific case of an odd default window is the sharpest version. A browser that opens at a size that does not match the screen looks like a bug, and the natural response to a bug is to fix it. Maximising the window is an instinct, it takes half a second, and the reasoning behind the odd size is not printed anywhere the reader was looking.

What it actually does here

The default configuration is not a starting point, it is the entire mechanism. The value of a browser designed for this is that everyone who runs it looks alike from the outside, and looking alike is not a property of the software, it is a property of the population running it unmodified. One person changing something does not weaken everyone else. It only separates that person from the group.

Window dimensions are the plainest example. The size of the drawable area is available to any page, and a maximised window reports whatever the screen happens to be, which is a more specific number than most people expect. This is why some builds letterbox the content, keeping the reported size in coarse steps rather than exact ones, and why the resulting bars around the page are deliberate rather than unfinished.

Extensions are visible in effect even when they are not visible in name. An add on that changes a page changes what the page can observe about itself, and a page that looks modified is a page that has been narrowed to visitors running that modification. Blocking is a real benefit on the ordinary web and the trade is usually worth it. Here the trade runs the other way.

Zoom, fonts and themes work the same way, at smaller scale. A non standard zoom level changes measurements a page can take. Extra installed fonts change what can be rendered. A different theme changes some reported values on some builds. None of these is dramatic on its own, and the point has never been about any single one of them individually.

The default is the mechanism

This is the one page in the section where the advice inverts. Everywhere else the suggestion is to turn a feature off. Here it is to leave things exactly as they arrived, including the parts that are mildly annoying, because the annoyance is load bearing.

It helps to hold the reason in a single line rather than as a list of settings, since new settings appear with every release and the reasoning survives them.

Anything that makes your browser more comfortable than everybody else's also makes it more distinguishable than everybody else's.

Comfort is what makes you legible

It is worth saying clearly that wanting these things is not a failure of discipline. Small text is hard to read. Adverts are genuinely intrusive. A window that does not fill the screen looks broken. The instinct to fix all three is the instinct of somebody using their computer properly, and on every other site it costs nothing at all.

The practical resolution is not to give up comfort, it is to keep the comfortable browser and the unmodified one apart. A person can have a heavily customised everyday browser and a second one left entirely alone, and lose nothing except the habit of adjusting whichever window is in front of them.

What to do instead

The whole of this page reduces to leaving one browser alone, and doing the adjusting in the other one where it costs nothing.

Leave the window at the size it opens at, including when that size looks wrong, and resist maximising out of habit.
Install no extensions at all on the browser used for this, including the ones that improve privacy elsewhere.
Leave zoom at the default. If text is too small, change the screen resolution or sit closer rather than changing the page scale.
Leave the theme, fonts and any appearance settings untouched, and keep your preferences in the browser you use for everything else.
Do all of your customising in your everyday browser, which is where it belongs and where it does no harm.

How to notice you did it anyway

Adjustments accumulate quietly, so the check here is a periodic look at what has drifted rather than a search for an event.

Open the extensions list and confirm it is empty, since some installers add entries without a visible prompt.
Reset zoom explicitly rather than assuming it is at the default, because a stray shortcut sets it per site.
Note the window size the browser opens at, then check whether it is still opening that way a month later.
Look at the appearance settings for anything you changed and forgot, including font and theme choices.
After any update, compare the settings screens against what you remember, since defaults occasionally move.

What readers ask about this habit

Is an ad blocker really a bad idea here?

On this kind of browsing, yes, even though it is a good idea nearly everywhere else. An extension that changes pages makes the browser observably different from an unmodified one, which is the opposite of what this setup is for. Keep it on your everyday browser.

Why does the window open at a size that does not fit the screen?

Because the size of the drawable area is readable by any page, so keeping it in coarse steps stops it from being a precise measurement. The bars that appear around the content are part of that behaviour rather than a rendering fault.

Does changing one small setting really matter?

One setting alone rarely does much. The concern is the combination, since several small differences together describe a much smaller group than any of them separately. Leaving everything alone is simply the version of that with no bookkeeping.