The New York Times did a redesign. They write, in part,
We have expanded the page to take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers.
My response: “Hey, who said we read (or want to read) ANY web site with the browser window filling the whole screen? The only people I know who do that are n00b Windows users.”
Just because most of your visitors have a screen that size doesn’t mean they don’t have 28 other programs open also taking screen real estate, like I do now.
Their choice of window size is a stupid assumption, which is, in turn, an amateur mistake. I’d expect better.