IE shows only partial screens of websites

[Walter R.]

I use WinXP SP2. 19" LCD monitor, IE6, Pentium 4 1600, 512 Ram, 128 MB video
card

Why is it that many web sites do not open in the full screen view? Either
they get cut off at the right side and I have to scroll to see all of the
page, or there is a narrow stripe (~1") on both sides of the screen.

EG: Google is fine, so is Wikipedia, so is the home page of Yahoo, but the
subpages of Yahoo have a 1" strip on both sides.

http://www.ams.usda.gov/admin/index.htm is aligned to the left, with an
empty strip on the right

http://www.adobe.com/ has a 1" empty strip on both sides. They sell
Dreamweaver and one would think that they know how to build properly
functioning websites!

So, where is the problem, is it my IE6 browser? Do I need to change some
settings?

Maybe I should try Firefox?

 

[Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE/WM]

I use WinXP SP2. 19" LCD monitor, IE6, Pentium 4 1600, 512 Ram, 128 MB
video card

Why is it that many web sites do not open in the full screen view? Either
they get cut off at the right side and I have to scroll to see all of the
page, or there is a narrow stripe (~1") on both sides of the screen.

EG: Google is fine, so is Wikipedia, so is the home page of Yahoo, but the
subpages of Yahoo have a 1" strip on both sides.

http://www.ams.usda.gov/admin/index.htm is aligned to the left, with an
empty strip on the right

http://www.adobe.com/ has a 1" empty strip on both sides. They sell
Dreamweaver and one would think that they know how to build properly
functioning websites!

So, where is the problem, is it my IE6 browser? Do I need to change some
settings?

IMHO it's bad programming. The author programmed for a particular width
display window. If it narrower than yours you get the blank areas on the
sides. If it is wider than yours you get that terribly annoying horizontal
scroll bar. Good programming would allow the browser to fit the content to
the window with just a vertical scroll bar. There aren't any settings you
can change to fix this besides the width of your window. Note: Microsoft
is also often guilty of this.