Good points! The unfortunate side effect of having 4k and 8k screens is that 1080p is still common. I could understand why they'd assume nobody leaves a browser window covering only a quarter of their screen, but at the same time, both major browsers have a Responsive Mode where you can test screen resolutions, orientations, and tap events.
There are devices with resolutions under 800x600 still accessing the Web. Every developer has to place where their own minimum threshold of consideration is. I personally aim for those old-school resolutions as the minimum, and may move upwards to something like 720p if it's a bit more complex. My screen itself is 1080p, so if it looks good at full screen, it will probably look decent on 4k as well as long as I'm using scaling units.
The reason most websites won't be optimized for 4K resolution is that very few people will be running 4K at 100%; that'd be incredibly tiny on a ~27" monitor. And even if people were running at that resolution, they'd only actually be using 4K if the app was fullscreened, which seems overkill on a resolution that high.
As an example, I myself am running 4K monitors scaled as 2560x1440, so there's no need for apps to optimize for 4K resolution, for me. Just high DPI.
If you're talking about optimising a web app you're developing, then you could use a bigger media query that targets 4K resolutions specifically, and handles it specifically. But I'd be surprised if you ever get anyone actually benefitting from that.
While this is true, I don't want humanity to simply give up and stay on 1080p forever. If anything, this issue arose precisely because people were too comfortable with the "one true screen res to rule them all" instead of properly scaling.
And it was most frustrating to get phone and tablet screens MUCH better than a laptop or computer monitor!
At this stage I think a 27" 4K screen is ideal. Use highres when you can - particularly for reading text with a High DPI-aware app - and use 1080p for the legacy-rendering stuff or games.
Why? I argued that big resolutions are good and interfaces will soon catch up. Browsers are ready, operating systems are ready. Some legacy software might become tiny, but you can live with it by changing resolution when you need to use it.
Is that why so many websites suck on high resolution 4k screens? Because developers are looking at these websites on their tiny screens, lol makes so much sense
You know they make 4K screens that are the same size as regular 1080p right?
The point of 4K is clarity and legibility of text (at > 1.5x scaling), not size.
I don't get people who say 1080p is good enough for coding. They must have eyes at a lower resolution than mine not to being able to tell that text at 2x scaling is so much more readable and pleasant.
To me it seems the big thing 4k improves on is video immersiveness. After all, reality is 210 degrees field of view, not a comparatively tiny rectangle metres away, and it's crisp and sharp, not somewhat blurry-ish like Full HD at somewhat closer range. I like being able to have a considerably bigger rectangle in my face while still getting acceptable quality; 4k at 60fps is a joy, feels real in a way movies usually don't. Besides, on mobile devices and tablets especially, it's really neat to be able to pinch-zoom into a video and still get some quality. That's not possible with Full HD.
As for Chromium (and by extension all major modern browsers), it's played a pretty important part in making the web a platform to reach pretty much everyone with comparably little effort. A lot of the productivity applications I use day-to-day are web apps, and I guess most wouldn't exist in their anything like their current form if there had to be native Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android apps that people would have to download and install and update and secure (and certainly no Linux app – way too few users to even think about).
To my mind that adds a lot of intrinsic value, at the price of much higher resource consumption, true, but I'd rather have that than the snail pace of innovation and still usually questionable quality we had in the "old days"...
As someone who used 768p 15" laptop until late 2019, yes, everyone else has to deal with bs huge menus. Oh the number of webpages that would have you scroll horizontally, often with white bar on both sides... The day I upgraded to 1080p I could feel a sense of joy in being able to see the web as it was designed. And now every web developer is beginning to develop on 27" (or less) 4K displays and the target is shifting for less fortunate yet again.
Note that I was talking about the full benefit of 1080p, not 4k. My points are that 4k is usually pointless, and therefore that 1080p is usually better than just "minimally acceptable", since most of the time we don't even get the full benefit of it.
> On mobile, 720p starts to get shoddy once your screen hits 5 inches across.
Even assuming you're right abut this, I guess I really just have a hard time caring. Anything you watch on your phone is at best something you don't give a shit about, artistically speaking, and it's hard to imagine 1080p vs 720p making any kind of difference to the experience. (I suppose I might be biased since my screen is "only" 5.2 inches diagonally - I get the smallest one I can whenever I buy a new phone.)
And for what it's worth, using the same math as for my previous comment, you can't even get the full benefit of 720p on a 5 inch diag screen unless you're holding it less than a foot from your face. Granted, you can get the full benefit of 1080p at a little under 8 inches, but I'm suffering even imagining trying to watch a video this way. Even at this distance, I would dispute using "shoddy" to describe how 720p will look.
The math is actually pretty simple: for a 720p screen, there are sqrt(12802 + 7202) pixels on the 5 inch diagonal, so a distance of 5 inches / sqrt(12802 + 7202) per pixel. 20/20 visual acuity can resolve roughly 1 arc minute, or pi/10800 radians. By the arc length formula, the distance we calculated subtends that angle at (5 inches / sqrt(19202+10802)) * (10800/pi), or 11.7 inches.
> And in my experience there's a lot of screens closer than 10 feet to couches.
Note that I addressed this point. If you have a pretty typical 50 inch TV, you've got to have it closer than 7 feet from your couch for 4k to make any difference at all.
This resonates with something I was thinking too. Basically everyone who has had a web experience hooked up to their 1080p TV has been screwed for a long time. Basically an '800px' layout has sucked for at least 5 years now on both 1920 x 1200 monitors and the aforementioned HD setup. There is no 'Retina' war, there is only web design stuck between the same rock and the same hard place. I feel for them but your tool box has to account for that.
To me many screen resolutions have gotten too small for comfort. Desktop large real estate is cool but sometimes I would rather switch desktops or run another monitor than squint my eyes to see another tiny window.
This did not happen on mobile devices although they are all also 4k now. I think the main reason being that our fingers aren't any smaller either.
That 8K near the end of that post is four times as many pixels to render as 4K. It's a surface area, it scales quadratically.
On top of that, the more pixels you have, the more a high frame rate matters to make animations look smooth. Sure, that might mostly just be scrolling on a webpage, but people care about this stuff. It's also physically less tiring for the eyes.
(Don't forget that, mobile includes laptops too - I'd like a high-res screen on my next laptop without the battery draining like crazy)
Question for folks who have 4k resolution on a smaller screen (like 28"). Isn't most text (like text on websites) IMPOSSIBLY SMALL to read? My laptop has 1080p res and is 15 inches, and my goodness I can't read anything without Ctrl +'ing in Chrome until things are at least scaled at 125% (I generally use the web at 150% though). 15 * 4 = 60... (as 1080p * 4 ~= 4k), that means I'd need easily 80+ inch screen to be using 4k screens. How in the heck would you deal with things with 4k on a 28" screen?
i write code for a living, so I'm in a similar boat. all my screens are 1080p and I don't have any problems.
my point was that this is actually not a deal breaker for most users. just a deal breaker for some users. I would venture to say they are even in the minority.
I probably can't see even 320x240, but that doesn't mean I don't like having the extra pixels since I don't stare at one spot the whole time. Upgrading to 4k felt extremely liberating compared with 1080, IMO - productivity is so subjective I'm not sure it can be said scientifically that more screen real estate is necessarily pointless. Plus, imagine a screen the size of a whole wall - if you want to project a life size image of a desktop computer onto it, you can only ever render some small subset of your pixels as its screen, so if you want to render it with a 1080 display you'll need a lot more than 4k. The number of pixels one needs is highly dependent on what one is doing with those pixels.
It is truly funny how first people want 4k monitors but when an application actually uses the given size at full, they cry about "oh, it is too wide", and we end up with disgusting design of web pages with ultra-narrow column of content and wide empty (or ads-filled) columns by both sides.
I would have thought the same several years ago. At age 40+, 1080p on a laptop is still good. Even at 1080p, I have to go into accessibility settings to enlarge text. I'm pretty much out of the market for 4k screens on laptops these days. Also had to switch to a big phone and crank up the text size.
Everyone going on about "no one runs at that resolution! Stupid comparison!" Are missing the point.
The point is that a properly designed UI will adjust to the resolution in use. And this doesnt just mean monitor resolution when running full screen. This also pertains to /floating windows/. Which often are the equivalent of 800x600 resolution.
A lot of modern UIs are full of bullshit white space that takes up tremendous amount of screen estate for no damn reason.
You can have a high DPI screen and a UX/UI that comfortably scales information density and widget sizes.
That one commenter mentioned running the old word on a modern 4K monitor and of course that wont be great for a lot of people /if it's not scaling at all/ (i try to run everything native but my vision is great).
Tl,dr: white space is abused and wasting screen space in modern UIs. High density is wasted on extreme scaling. Modern UIs and UXs are "optimized" for fat fingered geriatrics with tremors (touch) or blind geriatrics (desktop) at the expense of information density. Also, apparently users are too dumb to understand denser UX according to some engineers.
I’d add that for most people, you should go higher than 1080p regardless of screen size. UHD/4k/Retina are all a huge improvement just when looking at text and it’s hard to go back.
Yep, text looks nicer in 4k. So what? 1080p is still plenty workable. I remember the jump from my 1024x768 CRT Sony to my first LCD monitor (I think it was 1920x1200?). Now THAT was an upgrade. 4k is just trivial in comparison. I for one intend to use my 1080p monitors until they die and cannot be fixed.
There are devices with resolutions under 800x600 still accessing the Web. Every developer has to place where their own minimum threshold of consideration is. I personally aim for those old-school resolutions as the minimum, and may move upwards to something like 720p if it's a bit more complex. My screen itself is 1080p, so if it looks good at full screen, it will probably look decent on 4k as well as long as I'm using scaling units.
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