There has been a lot of progress made in computer monitor design lately. They have grown bigger, and at the same time, wider. That’s great for video editors, desktop publishers and animators. For web programmers and app developers, though, not so much.

Take a web page for instance. Viewing it on a widescreen (landscape) monitor may allow you to super-size it, but at some point you’ll have to spin the old scroll wheel to see the rest of the story. Web pages are meant to be moved up and down. A wide monitor may let you view multiple pages side by side, but you will still have to scroll.

Web pages are meant to be viewed in an upright, vertical (portrait) position. They are the digital equivalent of a newspaper. How are newspapers presented? Portrait. Sure, you can open it wide and put two pages in your field of view, but you still have to look up and down to see all the content.

A monitor that can turn to portrait mode may have more benefit for your workflow than you think.

There are many benefits of working with a vertical monitor, and they all boil down to one thing – more space. Turning their view 90 degrees developers can see more lines of code. Veteran code crunchers will say their portrait monitors can display as many (or more than) 84 lines of code. The landscape view shows them somewhere around 46. That’s an increase of some 82% by flipping their monitor on its ear.

Some people opt to use two landscape monitors side-by-side. While an option, this setup doesn’t really show them as much as they think it will. A great alternative of the dual monitor setup is to have one portrait next to a landscape one, or one landscape monitor between two portrait ones.

Computer monitors grew more and more widescreen for mostly one reason: content. The rise of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime drove people to consume this internet-based programming on internet-connected devices. For most people that meant their Mac or PC. Now there are smart TVs with built-in apps to handle that content and monitors can concentrate on…code. And TV, too!

It’s unknown who was the first to flip their monitor into a portrait mode. What is known, however, is a bunch of people jumped on the bandwagon.

It really comes down to the type of content you work with. Viewing long, narrow content on a landscape monitor leaves a lot of white space on the sides. Lots of untapped monitor real estate. Viewing long, narrow content on a portrait monitor cuts out the unused space and enables you to concentrate on your content.

Portrait monitors have advantages, for sure, but there are some drawbacks as well.

Some find a flipped monitor too tall. Unlike landscape, which requires a wider field of view, portrait requires a narrower gaze. Finding a “sweet spot” in the center of a portrait monitor is harder. We are used to scanning from right to left and back on landscape monitors, where portrait ones make you look up and down. A variable height desk is a good solution for this.

Ironically, a lot of websites are designed on portrait monitors, but designed for landscape ones. They are scaled for the wider view which sometimes requires you to scroll left and right to view the content.