Using either IE 7 ot Firefox 2 I have started to notivce that some web pages are only taking up 2/3 of the screen and the the 1/3 to the right is empty. Nothing I can do will make these pages fill up the whole screen. The amount of empty space seems to vary with the machine  I am using. My main desktop has very little wasted space and my 2 lap tops a great deal.

Is this a new issue ? that others have experiemced ? is there a solution ?  Its no big deal
but I'm just curious. Perhaps part of my security is stopping adverts ?

   My guess would be that it has nothing to do with you or your computers (except that your screen resolution is different than the webpage expects) but that it has to do with how the webpage was written.  In other words, the webpage was written for a certain width of screen and yours is wider than that, so there is blank space on the side.  This would especially be true if you have changed the resolution of your screen so that it is more than normal ( normal being 800x600 or 1024x768 ).
   You might give us the address of a website that has empty space on it and we could see how it looks on our computers.  I may also be able to look at the source code and see if it is in fact written for a certain width.

Hi Ray

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/wei.html    This one works fine on all my machines.

But http://www.bbc.co.uk/ fills various amounts of the screen depending upon whether it is a desktop machine or a lap top.
On the machine I am using now the BBC fills up about 80% from left to right.

Have just tried 800 x 600 on a 21 inch CRT and the BBC page fills the screen. Perhaps the BBC think that 800 x 600 is normal ?

  Yes, I have a resolution of 1024x768 and it shows the BBC page (www.bbc.com) with blank space along the right side.  You can also drag the right side of the browser out on the BBC site and see that the text does not extend.  Whereas, if you drag it out with this page, it does extend.
   I looked in the code of the page and they set the width of the page to a certain amount.  They do this because they want to be able to dictate exactly how the page will look.  If the page were allowed to have different widths on different computers, the various parts of the page would not fit on some computers and it would look strange.

Thanks - it seems there is nothing that I can about it. Its not really important but just irritating to realize how much control others have over what we see and do.