Widescreen monitors vs. square monitors

Thread necromancy!

Widescreen 16:10 monitors have been the standard for a while now. At sufficient resolutions, they let you view two documents or spreadsheets side by side, which is the main advantage from a work perspective. They also give more room than older monitors for tools and graphs in programs like Photoshop.
In gaming they give a wider field of view.
Now, most monitor manufacturers are moving to 16:9 (true movie-style widescreen) displays. In higher resolution these are fine, but lower-resolution panels (ie, 1366x768) sometimes lack the vertical pixels to display web pages and whatnot if your browser has some toolbars, and things like that.
Right now, you can mostly buy 16:10 or 16:9 monitors.... choose whichever you're more comfortable with.