Almost 50% of the screen space to each side is "wasted", seems a little archaic. Is there a way to have the actual data fill the screen? Another drawback is that some externally hosted images are not resized correctly and the right edge gets cut off...

In short a happy medium is the goal, I think PCGUY has reached it. As for the issues you mentioned has other forums done the same thing on the same device at the same connection point?

I think it's more that the text in posts would be harder to read in a wide format, if I wrote several paragraphs with use of the full screen and same text size as you pan you view back over to start the next line you loose track of which line you were on.
I just wish the boxes on the left were more consistent, I'd love to see latest threads while in a thread, instead I keep a separate tab

That's what I was thinking, I wish 'recent topics ' was way longer, or even an open box with my recent posts in it, instead I have to go searching in my profile under 'view your posts'

jrrdw wrote:In short a happy medium is the goal, I think PCGUY has reached it. As for the issues you mentioned has other forums done the same thing on the same device at the same connection point?

Let's take this recent post as an example, the last image is cropped on all the platforms I've checked it on. Don't you think that we could increase the default width by 25% without interfering with user experience. I'm on a 20 inch wide monitor right now and the forum is 10 inches wide, it does seem a little silly from where I'm standing.

I think it's more that the text in posts would be harder to read in a wide format, if I wrote several paragraphs with use of the full screen and same text size as you pan you view back over to start the next line you loose track of which line you were on.

I'm on other forums where it takes up the full width of the screen and I can't say it's been a problem.

I just wish the boxes on the left were more consistent, I'd love to see latest threads while in a thread, instead I keep a separate tab

Seconded.

It depends. A line of text as wide as most modern monitors is really hard to read, which is why most websites still at least wrap text to a moderate length. Other things can fill up the space though, but there's a lot of work that goes into this kind of stuff.