Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

I'm not sure why the whole content area is squished into a column only 1170px wide

http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

The optimal line length for your body text is considered to be 50-60 characters per line, including spaces (“Typographie”, E. Ruder). Other sources suggest that up to 75 characters is acceptable. So what’s the downsides of violating this range?

• Too wide – if a line of text is too long the reader’s eyes will have a hard time focusing on the text. This is because the line length makes it difficult to gauge where the line starts and ends. Furthermore it can be difficult to continue onto the correct line in large blocks of text.
  
• Too narrow – if a line is too short the eye will have to travel back too often, breaking the reader’s rhythm. Too short lines also tend to stress readers, making them begin on the next line before finishing the current one (hence skipping potentially important words).
  

We do it for readability.

Extremely long lines of text are significantly harder for people to read, and it gets exponentially harder with every word beyond the optimal range.

We already blow through the optimum, at the widest the forum goes the characters per line on average is around 107. This is because there is a lot of scientific proof that reading on the web is more comfortable with lines around the 80>90cpl (characters per line), and that the downward slope into unreadable text starts around 100cpl becoming unreadable very quickly after 120cpl. So we do push the optimum according to our media, the web, but it remains the case that whilst some people prefer 95+cpl, some hate it, and yet the vast majority find ~75cpl to be extremely enjoyable as a reading experience.

You are obviously quite comfortable with the idea of a cpl above 100, but yet many people find this as slow and unwieldy to read at as 35cpl. Allowing the content to be wider would make the site unreadable for a lot of people.

@mashton was right in that if you do prefer to browse full screen the best experience can be obtained from turning your monitor from landscape to portrait and zooming so that the content fills the entire page and you obtain far more height. At least, I think @mashton said that.