Tim:
Most screens tend to be rather poor resolution, so you have little choice but to run windows full-screen, and with biggish fonts.
Joe Zeff:
I've never had a problem with that, and until April, when I had cataract surgery, I was intensely nearsighted. Of course, I do keep my monitor closer than most people do, but that's because I still need reading glasses and it's simpler.
With a low resolution device, there's a finite limit to how small writing can be, before you run out of pixels to show nice looking writing. Sure, chunky (English) text can be drawn with a minimum of about 7 by 8 pixels, like the old dot matrix printers and green screen VDUs. But it looks ugly, and isn't really enough for anything beyond ye olde A-Z characters.
So, that mean there's a minimum font size limit. Then, to see as much as the page as you can, to avoid the "reading a magazine through a keyhole" effect, it also means a largish minimum window size limit.
And, in my case, I do not like being close to monitors. Particularly VDUs that strobe. So I'm using to viewing them from probably double the distance most people would.