I have to say I’m not that enthralled with the new update to Words With Friends. I play it exclusively on my home desktop computer (running WinXP with a Firefox browser). I can deal with the decreased size of the game board, because I have to, apparently, but I am getting really annoyed about the fact there’s an entire pane of my screen on the right edge, that’s given over to ads. On my regular Facebook screen, this pane extends only as far left as the “m” in the word “Home.” In the new WwF layout, however, it not only is wide enough to go off to the right far enough to make the screen require a horizontal scrollbar, it extends into the actual game board. Not enough to completely obscure the tiles I’m placing, but it does make it impossible to preview how many points I stand to get if I submit a word along that edge.
Ah, it looks like your screen resolution is just a bit lower than modern norms. I think the easiest way to deal with this is just to zoom Firefox out a little bit by pressing Ctrl-Minus (or Ctrl-Mouse Wheel Down) a few times when playing Words with Friends. You can zoom back in afterward (push Ctrl-0, as in zero, to reset to default zoom).
Thanks! A single click on the mouse wheel did the trick!
I still think they’re sending a subtle signal that they don’t really welcome players who aren’t on mobile devices.
Or maybe they’re optimizing it for Windows 8.1, foolishly believing that the touchscreen is the future of ALL computing (my playing partner/opponent told me that tapping on the playing area would increase the size of the board).
Glad it worked! It’s kind of surprising that they don’t support lower resolutions better. 1024*768 was the most common resolution of the last decade or so, and still the second most common. I doubt they were optimizing for Win 8.1, since it’s been such a crash and burn and not all 8.1 devices are touchscreens anyway. Probably just moving towards wider-screen laptops and such, or frankly, just exercising the design sense called Notgivingafuck.
Take a look at rival free Scrabble clone Wabble.org for how much better it COULD be done: No (or very few) ads, and the game area resizes on the fly to your browser window, adding or eliminating optional panels as size permits. It works very well no matter which device you’re on, and you can play with people who don’t use Facebook. It’s nice.
