i much prefer playing games on a 4:3, so this sucks if i cant find any 24" 4:3 in the future.
Also, imho, web browsing is much better with a 4:3, as it been said, cos most of the content is spread in a vertical way.
right now i own a 21" ips 4:3 and i love it.
Watch out, because gaming on 4:3 can be a huge handicap depending on the game. You could be a competitive disadvantage, especially in a game like Starcraft 2.
Take a look at how you literally punish yourself when you game at 4:3 in Starcraft 2 - you can't even see the unit formation farther away, so you'd be caught off-guard if your opponent is unit-massing just outside your range of view:
Now, I suppose your game could use letterboxing to provide you with a simulated wider field of view so you don't actually miss anything. But guess what? That will effectively convert your 24" 4:3 monitor to something like a smaller 20" 16:9 (I'm guessing to the actual dimensions, but you see what I mean in this scenario where a good amount of your screen real estate is devoted to black bars displaying nothing at all so it's equivalent to a smaller screen). It's annoying to have a bunch of screen real estate, but then handicap your screen by running letterbox mode.
The point is, the games are enabling wider FOVs, and you get a tactical and very real competitive disadvantage if you are using a narrower FOV than everyone else. What games are you playing at 4:3 that you enjoy, just out of curiosity? Could your enjoyment be based on "blissful ignorance" of not realizing you are missing out on an available wider FOV (please excuse the derogatory terminology, I don't mean to call you ignorant, just trying to clarify whether you have actual basis for why 4:3 is preferable to wider FOV aspect ratios in the context of gaming, as opposed to 'good enough for me therefore it's great' type of anecdotal evidence - not meant as personal attack - and I'm going by how I personally was blissfully ignorant when I was first playing SC2 on 16:10 1920x1200 until I tried it on a 16:9 and my jaw dropped and I realized I was making a huge mistake by not using 16:9)
I very much agree with you on 4:3 being nice for web browsing, although another poster has a very good counterpoint about how you get an even better experience when you rotate the 16:9 display - this is potentially even better than 4:3 because you get even more vertical real estate and web browsing is primarily a vertical experience. So perhaps the 16:9 is actually ideal, so long as you take advantage of wider FOV in games for competitive advantage, and rotate to portrait mode for web browsing? Is 4:3 really just a compromise so consumers will avoid having to pay more for 4:3 because they see 16:9 as ideal due to the lower price and gaming/browsing benefits?