Browser Page Not Filling Screen

[bigbanana]

I've got a strange problem with a new PC and it's widescreen TFT monitor that may have been caused by the kids fiddling with it.

In both IE7 and Firefox on the Vista PC, the browser page has a plain white bar about two inches wide on the left and right hand sides of the page. There is no content at all in these bars. The bars extend from the bottom of the browser window to the bottom of the main toolbar menu. The main screen top toolbar ie reload, history etc along with the address bar is full width on the screen. The text content in the visible window in both IE and Firefox appears in a smaller font although it's possible it may be squashed.

Trying to extend the window makes no difference. Reinstalling Firefox did not help either. The screen has been like this for a few days now and I've even tried making adjustments to the display via Control Panel to no avail.

Programs eg MS Word open full width with no problems - only the browsers are affected.

Would anybody have any idea what could cause this effect please?

Many thanks.

[bigbanana]

Incidentally, my ISP is Tiscali and up to recently, I've always used a CRT monitor. Having said that, the TFT monitor has displayed the browser pages fine for almost a month when I bought the PC.

[rojash]

You haven't said which sites you are looking at. AB displays like this on my monitor, simply because my monitor is capable of displaying sizes larger than the designed page of AB. On some sites the pages will resize to fit the width of your browser, on others they won't. Some sites will display in the centre of your browser, some will display on the left. This is normal. Your TFT monitor is almost certainly capable of displaying at a much higher resolution than your old CRT screen. Have you adjusted the resolution lately?

[rojash]

I should have mentioned also that if you have a sidebar (eg. History or Bookmarks) then the width of the sidebar will affect the amount of white space shown on a web page. If I drag my Bookmarks sidebar out to its maximum width, then AB will show without any white space, but of course, if I visit a site with fixed width pages that are larger than those of AB, then I will not be able to see the whole page...

[bigbanana]

Thanks rojash. I've heard of pages displaying as you describe and I thought initially that this might be the answer.

However, the white bars are present on all websites I look at with no exception. The white bars are also present regardless of whether or not the bookmarks/history list is displayed ie if the sidebar is displayed, then the white gap is pushed over into the main viewing window. When a sidebar is not displayed the white gap takes its approximate place on the left hand side of the screen.

Thanks again.

[rojash]

How weird is that? Never heard of such a thing! I hope someone else can come up with a suggestion, 'cos you've stumped me...