Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
I assume it’s part of a trend of having as much useless white space as possible, so that they can stuff more ads into it.
For 1080p screens at least, 170% zoom seems to be perfect fit for most content (for websites where 100% zoom is likely designed for lower resolutions) meaning sidebar ads are not even on-screen (IIRC, maybe you’d need to scroll to not see the left one but not sure how to test this).
Though I guess more sites likely don’t need as much zoom to fill content, for instance Kbin is full-width at 150%. Itch doesn’t have whitespace even at 100% (on the right side, the left side has it due to the left sidebar that is stuck at the top of the page).