In more early years, printer friendly web pages seemed to be reserved to news web sites and, without a questioning, they were right to implement this functionality. News web pages were bringing a large amount of content from their printed pages online, but there were also screens with small resolutions which made it extremely hard to extend how we read printed materials on the web.
Jakob Nielsen noted(1) that, based on a conducted research, about 79 percentage of Internet users prefer to scan rather than to read. Among the notes, although nobody knows why for sure, there are four plausible reasons and the most important one is that reading on the computer is tiring.
In the Usability.gov guidelines document(2), although a quite old article, the steps of optimizing the user experience are still active to this day. Their comments regarding the functionality to allow printing out web pages is that users find this to be more convenient and it also allows them to make notes on paper.
The convenience given by a ready-for-printing web page is a pillar of user experience. Let us not forget the annoying web experiences where users had to copy a text, paste it in a text editor and then print it because it was not printer-friendly or when they simply hit “print this page” button and what they got from the machine was a trimmed text and too much unused white space.
