I think he did that so that things like code, which are messed up by wrap-around, can be presented cleanly.

See this thread on the feature-request perma-story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229095

PG previously added a fix I suggested that, at least in FF2, had the nice quality of clipping PRE areas to whatever your browser width is, while enabling a horizontal scrollbar for the PRE when you moused in.

Unfortunately, this never worked quite right in other browsers, and doesn't work in FF3. In my experiments, the only way to get the same desirable effect in FF3 is with a DIV-based layout. (There might be some DOCTYPE voodoo that would make it work with TABLEs, but I haven't found it.)

So as far as I can tell: the best fix requires a change to the News.YC/arc HTML generation.

That could be, but there's got to be a solution that doesn't force me to set my browser window to 1920 pixels wide to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar.

Most code examples are ok. The problem is that users use it for quotes. Perhaps a better solution would be to support the <blockquote>

Sounds like a job for user preferences.

Thought you were going to say "Sounds like a job for big government!" :-) only joking

"overflow: scroll" doesn't force a line-wrap. What you're thinking of is the "white-space" property.