Agreed. Trying to read the forums on a landscape laptop monitor is a miserable experience. I have about 5 inches of space between those two bars. At least give the option to collapse them and expand them only when we need them? (which expansion for the bottom bar would be absolutely never as far as I'm concerned). The bottom bar especially is wasted pixels. No reason you couldn't have put the links to that social crap under the Community tab. Most of us are just going to hide those links with NoScript and AdBlocker anyway ;).

Laurie