Laptop pages half-width screen

My wife just got a new Dell laptop with a 15" screen. (It's the new Ultra-max screen - beautiful!) When she surfs the net (IE 6.0), why do a lot of the pages come up about half-width? Some, like CNN.com, will start at the left margin of the screen and occupy about half the width of the screen (the full width of the page is visible, it's not cut-off), leaving a blank screen on the right-hand side. My bank's website pages come up centered in the screen, with about 1/4 of the screen blank on each side. Our desktops pull up the pages full-width, i.e., they occupy the full width of the monitor.

Is there any way to adjust this? Changing text size makes the text bigger, but doesn't change the overall width of the displayed web page. Kind of hard on these 50+ eyes!

Thanks,
John

I get the same thing on my desktop with the screen resolution set at 1024 X 768. On my husband's desktop set at 800 X 600, the pages all display full width.

Apparently, it's due to how the page is coded. I was told once it's because the author of the page designated the width of the page in pixels rather than percentage of screen. Others have since disagreed with that explanation but the fact remains the problem doesn't occur at 800 X 600.

Since I prefer 1024 X 768, I just live with it...and wonder why some web developers don't get a clue. ;)

Miz, I think you'll find you were right and that the page would have been designed in 800x600 as well to compound matters still further.

The worst offenders are those who design in 1024x768 in pixels. I think I prefer to have half a screen filled with text and images than to have side scroll!

I know that there are javascripts available that check the browser and resolution and redirect you to the relevant resolution size page, but that isn't always helpful, seeing as a number people turn javascripts off. (hint hint! web designers, I don't!!)

Actually, there's a task for Bill Gates' Team, (unless there an app already out there, in which case go and buy the company) to integrate a page resizer into IE7, to fit Window width.