Responsive Design – Is it worth accounting for drastic resizing of browser viewport?

[Fillip]

I am in the process of redesigning my website and have a nice responsive design worked out. As a developer, I like testing my site within my computers browser to use my browser’s dev tools; resizing the window to account for the different screen sizes (phone, tablet, desktop, etc.).

On some occasions, I find a jquery plugin (let’s say a simple content slider) responds well when a page is loaded, but after the viewport is resized (let’s say from 1920×1080 to 320×480 the slider doesn’t look as pretty as it did before. Dimensions could be off, etc. Same works visa versa; resize 320×480 to 1920×1080.

I know as a developer, I do this resizing constantly to test for responsiveness, but I’m thinking a normal web user wouldn’t do this.

My question here is not so much how can I fix these types of issues, but in general, is it worth accounting for the user resizing their browser so drastically (1920×1080 to 320×480) on the same device?

Bonus question: Do you think the web will head in the direction of needing to account for drastic window resizing? (Theories appreciated!)

I’m thinking not, until we get some large Minority Report style devices in the public market. But by then, we’ll have bigger problems to worry about.

[TheDoc]

I generally always support browser resizing since it’s usually really easy to do.

Let’s say you had a function called `setUpSlider()` that you run when the page loads to get your slider all set up. You could easily run that same function on resize:

$(window).resize( function () {
setUpSlider();
}

[Author]

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