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Today's Average Screen Resolution?
ShadowDawn asks: "I'm looking to develop a website for average computer illiterate users and I'm just curious what the average users screen resolution is, now a days? I know 800x600 used to be the main size to develop for, but last I had seen 1024x768 was taking over. I was just wondering if anyone out there ran a 'normal' site that 'normal' people visit and would have some insight."
The funny thing is, resolution shouldn't matter much anymore. If you switch to a higher resolution, things shouldn't suddenly look a lot smaller, they should look sharper!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
1600 x 1200 @ 75hz here on a Samsung SyncMaster CRT (LCDs suck for photo work).
We have about 50% at 1024x768 and about 20% at 800x600. The rest is a wide mix with the common ones being 1280x1024 and 640x480.
Please don't force me to maximize my browser window just to noodle around your site(s). Do your HTML/CSS so that your web pages adjust with the size of the browser window. Please don't hard code table sizes in pixels and other such idiocies.
Why not just try to make the site work on a wide range of resolutions, as that way you will not be alienating that many people. It is not impossible to make a website that will stretch to large resolutions, and shrink to fit the smaller ones.
Personally I think 1024x768 and 1280x1024 are the two important ones to make sure the site works properly at, as 1024x768 seems to be very popular, however 1280x1024 is the native resolution of a large number of TFT screens.
I used to have 1600x1200 on everything, but none of my flat screens go that high - so the screen resolutions that people use have dropped a little from a couple of years ago when everyone was buying desktops with CRTs. I know a lot of people are even foregoing the desktop and just using a laptop instead, that's shrunk down the resolution as well.....
Some of your users will have huge 1600x1200 LCDs. Others will be running old hand-me-down 640x480 VGA monitors, or nice monitors with that stupid default resolution of Win95/98.
/any/ attention to "resolution".
But it doesn't matter. What you do is design your site in standards-compliant XHTML, using CSS for formatting (not tables), and let the user's browser render it however is best for that particular platform.
Web designers (and I am one) should not be paying
--
Twoflower
A geek website
1024x768 - 52%
1280x1024 - 18%
800x600 - 15%
A non-geek website
1024x768 - 68%
800x600 - 11%
1280x1024 - 10%
So, I would say that you are pretty safe with 1024x768, but don't make it impossible to use at 800x600.
-Ryan
Real Computer Illiterate Users don't use computers, and don't have a preferred screen resolution. Anyone using a computer has, by definition, some degree of computer literacy, in the same way anyone reading a book has some degree of "normal" literacy.
The question is moot, though, since Real Web Designers don't design web pages to a particular screen resolution. Also, real web designers often try to target a more specific audience than "people who don't use computers."
Don't design for a resolution, thats just as bad as designing for ie. Make a webpage, *TEST IT* in 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200, whatever, but don't design it for something. It should work fine in all resolutions, not having half the page wasted on blank space, or text overlapping, or any other problem that comes from bad web developers saying "thats okay, it works in what I designed it for"
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I think your target audience should be a big factor. Do you see there being a good chance that elderly people with bad eye sight could be visiting it often? There are still a lot of people out there with 800x600 resolutions. If you develop at a higher screen res then you will look like you don't really know what you are doing in the eyes of those people and it is so easy to hit back and look through other google results that have a design more suited to them.
On the other hand if you are developing something that primarily kids/teens/young adults will be visiting then you could probably safely bump it up to 1024x768 or maybe even higher, but that might be pushing it.
:wq
Stop.
Please.
You are the bane of the web browser.
Sites should be usable and viewable with any resolution with any web browser.
We do not want an art exhibit, we want a web page. With stuff on it. Knowledge.
I for example, frequently browse at 320 pixels across. I don't visit sites that don't work at that resolution. My employer uses his Treo frequently and has even worse to say on that.
But my resolution? Well above 2000 pixels across.
See, just because some web browsers (the users, not the programs) browse at full screen doesn't mean everyone does it.
Web pages are not canvases- they do not have a size, and by artificially attempting to create one, you are doing the web a disservice.
On the other hand, by treating them as such, chances are you have so little to say that it isn't useful at all in which case myself, and other web browsers simply won't visit your site.
You will of course think it has something to do with the modernness of your design and make it even less usable.
The cycle will continue.
And nobody will notice.
From what I've gathered from lurking behind people's back in public libraries and cybercafes, you're safe when assuming a 1024*768 screen. It seems that Windows users who don't know how to use a computer know at least "Close box" and "Maximize". Therefore, once you remove task bar / menu bar / Dock / toolbars, you have more than 500 pixels in height, and a good thousand pixels in width.
W3 Schools doesn't just include browser stats. They also track metrics regarding screen resolutions currently in use.
a sp
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
MTW
Why do you want to know the screen resolution? That isn't going to tell you what the viewport size is. Non-maximised browsers, browsers with sidebars open, larger than default scrollbars... there's huge amounts of ways in which the viewport size can differ from the screen resolution.
More importantly though, it sounds like you are trying to design a website with a fixed width. That's not necessary. Use percentages, and your layout will expand and contract to fit a wide range of viewports, without leaving an ugly and wasteful gap down the side in larger viewports and without forcing horizontal scrolling for smaller viewports.
I'd like to pre-empt the people complaining that longer line-lengths are harder to read by pointing out that there's evidence to suggest that those studies, while perfectly fine for print, don't apply to computer displays, and in any case can be mitigated by using max-width in ems on <p> elements in a user or author stylesheet.
I'd also like to pre-empt the people who say "but average users don't change the defaults!" by pointing out that, if true, would mean that the average user would be using a non-maximised browser window, as per Internet Explorer and Safari defaults.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
If your intended audience is the average computer illiterate, you should probably expect plenty of people still operating at 800x600. I know a lot of people who are perfectly happy with their old K6-2 and crappy 15" monitor, and have no plans to upgrade while it still functions. It sounds like those people are your target demographic.
That said, here is my opinion on the metatopic of which this is a part: If you don't clutter up your site with a bunch of unnecessary formatting crap, flash nonsense, menus, table, frames, etc., it won't matter what resolution your users are running at. HTML reformats itself to fit the display quite nicely as long as you web developers allow it to function as it was meant to.
The vast majority of the time, "good design" means less stuff, not more.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You're going to use a bunch of tables for presentation as well, aren't you?
I think most LCD displays are about 1280x1024 these days, so those users get a fuzzy display if they use anything else. During a quick walk through Office Depot, I noticed that they all but one of their dozens of LCD's were 1280x1024, as though they didn't expect anyone to pay for something bigger.
Some users will keep using 800x600 for a long while though, because they have vision problems and not every app looks great if you select large fonts, or they don't know larger fonts are an option.
I help run a small community history and information web site and checking google analytics I'm showing 31% of visitor use 800X600, 1% use 640x480 and the rest (~68%) use 1024x768 or higher. This data is based on 2000 unique visitors since December 1, 2005 to today. The site was originally designed for 800x600 back in 1998. When we do a redesign in 2006 it will probably be set up for 1024x768.
As the power flows in, the screen grows warm, another day starts, I'm at work again...
I hope nobody will mind if I go off on a semi-related mini-rant about 1280 x 1024. It drives me nuts that so many LCDs use it as their native resolution because to me it looks, well, wrong. 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1152 x 864, 1600 x 1200 etc. etc. all share the 1:1.33 aspect ratio that we've all become accustomed to looking at but 1280 x 1024 is 1:1.25 and it just doesn't look right to me. Am I all alone on this one?
My native resolution is 1280x800. Fixed width anything is going to look like garbage on my machine, as no one designs pages for widescreen aspect ratios.
It's been said plenty of times before, but designing for a fixed resolution is a bad idea. This is just one of the reasons why.
Goo goo g'joob.
What I would be curious to know is there any "pure" server-side solutions to determining screen resolution? I.e. if you are running CGI, you can query for stuff like REMOTE_ADDR, HTTP_USER_AGENT, etc. ... but is there any way of doing a real-time query for what the screen (or better yet actual browser) window size is and not have to use client-side Javascript.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
What Would Google Do?
Seriously look at a website designed for your type of people. AO Lusers.
You should expect whatever the computer came with (probably 800x600) with EVERY TOOLBAR EVER INVENTED. Plus a search side bar taking up about 1/3 of the left side. Oddly enough, those people hate surfing the net.
When I had a CRT, the highest it would go was 1280x1024.
Then I got my SGI 1600SW flat panel, which was 1600x1000.
Right now, I have a Cinema HD Display, which is 1920x1200.
So you can see that my screen resolution has increased enormously with the advent of the LCD. I really want to get a 30" Apple Cinema Display, but I'm expecting to do a lot of travel and so my resolution may actually shrink to the 17" PowerBook's 1680x1050. However, note that this is still a bit higher than my highest CRT resolution was.
Even in the mainstream, I think most people came from 1024x768 17" monitors, to 1280x1024 17" LCDs.
Back in the CRT days, most people had their systems set up for low resolution. It's only rabid geeks like me that ran their CRTs at high resolution.
Like the others here, I don't recommend that you design for a specific resolution. However, in my experience it's best to make the left and right sidebars fixed and assign the middle space to whatever resolution remains (usually the bulk of it). It gets pretty ugly if you assign left side 20, middle 60 and right 20 percent of the screen, since the left and right get huge, to no gain.
D
1600 x 1200 @ 75hz here on a Samsung SyncMaster CRT
:)
Same res @ 85Hz here, on a Hitachi CRT. Suck it.
(hey, you asked for it)
Totally cannot wait for LCDs or whatever flat panel technology to come out that's a) affordable, b) fast enough to not have ghosting issues, and c) true colour fidelity
Someday, my prince will come...*sigh*
16:10 in the house!
When sites are designed using a fixed width such as 800x600, the layout aften depends on assuming a small font size so that elements align properly. My banking site is one such web site. When the font size is increased, elements can overlap to shift to the next line, losing some of the contextual imformation of their placement. At worst the elements may be overlapped by other elements thereby obscuring whatever it is that you needed to see. I see this happen often with navigation items.
My recommendation is that while you are designing your site, use the keyboard shortcuts for font increase and decrease in Firefox to test and make sure that the page looks as expected. Another option would be to create another Firefox profile with the font set to 20 points and the minimum font size set to 14. This is what I use in my Firefox settings. I have a small laptop screen with a resolution of 1400x1050 which, when combined with my poor eyesight, has made a font size like this required for easy reading.
I also want to stress that if the layout of the page breaks a bit, that is fine. Most users that browse with a large minimum font size are used to seeing the page mess up a bit. There are sites such as Slashdot and Wikipedia that continue to look fine at any font size. Others might be using absolute positioning for DIVs and may have navigational and other elements obscured when the font is large. The important thing is to make sure that the elements on your page that make it functional still work. If something isn't aligned correctly but it's not a big deal, don't worry about it. If the navigation is only partially visible because of the larger font size, then you should fix that. For example, last.fm has some display problems when a larger font size is used, but nothing that impeeds navigation or general usability.
Finally, let me stress that you should avoid specifying your font sizes using a fixed method such as pixels or points. Instead, please use a relative font size such as "x-small", ems, or a percentage. There are still many users that use IE. IE will not resize fonts that use a fixed specification such as pixels and points, even when the font size option in the browser is changed from the default.
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using CSS for formatting (not tables)
That argument has nothing to do with using pixel width layout (I'm sure you know this, but many here won't; the programmer crowd and the web design crowd are two that don't have identical skillsets).
Using CSS for _formatting_ - what kind of formatting? There are two things here: layout and style
for layout, there are things you can do with tables that you cannot do well with CSS without resorting to hacks, browser-specific CSS, or even background images (to make things 'look' like columns). Depending on the design, this can be quite ugly - at least until CSS Column support is broadbased. I'm hoping for that with IE7, but I'm not holding my breath. For outer layout, I still find a table can be the best solution, then use CSS for everything else. It depends entirely on the design requirements. Not every design challenge has a CSS solution as the best one for _layout_. Though nested tables are still 'teh suk,' no doubt. Please read what I wrote here, and not what you may wish me to be saying; I'm not advocating a return to the 'tag soup' days.
for styling content, SURE, don't bother with anything but CSS.
We _really_ need IE to be fixed up to a point to be usable without resorting to so many hacks. And CSS still needs some massive improvement in functionality; there are things you just can't do with CSS layout-wise without multiply-nested DIVs that you can do with a single table, and that's just ridiculous.
That's easy: as my web needs 1024x768 to render correctly on ie, you all should have that screen size.
Just kidding, the trends are a 50% with 1024x768 and about 20% for 800x600, but you shouldn't care as you should write the web in a way that shows correctly on every resolution.
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
I don't know if you're one of those people designing web sites with microscopic fonts in a tiny strip, but if you are I should point out that most of the time I avoid your sites.
On the rare occasions that Google leads me to your site for some information that I critically need I hold down the Control key and tap the + sign three or four times to make your fonts readable. Wow does you're layoug f*cking suck reading a couple words per line across a tiny column pinched between obnoxious adds and pointless useless menus. And the fact that it won't expand when I widen my browser window (you didn't actually think my browser winow is wider than half my screen did you?) your stupid narrow text column doesn't expand, instead just the blank space expands.
I wonder if I might visit your site more often if it didn't look so horrible. I guess we'll never know.
Looking at google analytics for vadiumgroup.com I can see the following
58% 1024*768
17% 1280*1024
14% 800*600
1% below 800*600
10% above 1280*1024.
So, looks like if you built for 1024 you'd safe for 85% of the market, not bad.
Now this is no excuse to make a site that's unuseable at 800*600. You can use percentages almost everywhere and have your design scale for all resolutions.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I recently saw a site talking about typography for the web, and it stated that there is an 'ideal' width for lines of text, about 66 characters. Now, with CSS, you can specify in ems (the width of a capital M in whatever font/size you're looking at). So, specify text areas widths in ems to make it more readable - I haven't designed any new sites since I read this, but it seems very interesting.
CSS also had max-width and min-width options (that of course don't work in IE; hopefully in IE7) that one can make use of to make sure things don't get too narrow or too wide.
I'd suggest not listening to the jihadists here saying flat-out, "web sites should be resolution independent," as it's pretty obvious most of them aren't professional web designers who have to deal with a variety of layout needs -- BUSINESS needs that dictate how much and what kind of content, textual and graphical, that need to be on a web page sometimes. That's life in the professional world that most of us have to live in. If you're doing a web site for your OSS project, great, have at it, and make sure it doesn't look nice on IE while you're at it, but keep in mind that for the rest of us, web design activism doesn't pay the bills.
I still develop for 800x600 desktops, mainly because I know not everybody runs a browser with max width. As well, you can also consider fluid layouts, which are usually harder to develop artistically, but they flow well.
The big issue I've run into is font sizes, especially with images; I wish all browsers had Opera's zoom feature. I've had people preach em sizings to the masses, but sometimes it is better aesthetically to define sizes in px (especially in non-fluid layouts).
Still, you also have to consider font scalings in other font rendering engines. One of my biggest headaches has been developing text-focused layouts that work properly in Windows and Linux. - If you hit Security Engine, you'll notice that in certain font rendering systems, the book reviews box has a spillover issue, which I have neglected to work on for some time.. The joys of running an entire network by yourself with no real financial while trying to make a living as an independant web designer.
I just wish we could get more standardization in place for all these issues.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
2560x1024. Please make pages wider.
There, I said it. Make your design work at any resolution from 640x480 to 1600x1200, and any aspect ratio. I have a 1280x1024 screen - but I never enlarge my browser beyond 1024x768 because I like to have extra cascading room.
Philips 200w6 20 inch "widescreeen" LCD monitor:
a) affordable: 499 euros
b) fast enough to not have ghosting issues: 8ms switching time
c) true colour fidelity: OK, I do not have the specs for this, haven't read through the documentation yet.
my websites can expand (640+)
;)
www.soulfire.cc (which has festive x-mas decorations btw!) has to be at least 640 (or 620 i think it actually is, for scrollbar and window border) but it can stretch to fit the content as large as you want to go
www.delinquentminds.com also stretches now except none of the pages go very wide anymore (used to have forums which got pretty wide)
Sure some people may have increased, but one data point is not an average (unless it's the only data point!)
The funny thing is that I'm on a 1280x1024 display at my office, and yet 5 years ago I had a Dell laptop with a 1400x1050 display
You don't want the average, no matter what you think. I can guarantee you that none of your users will have the average screen resolution (which is probably something like 1143.1814 x 869.6295). In fact, I'd bet all of them will be (some integer) x (some integer) where neither integer is particularly close to the average.
--MarkusQ
Dear fixed-width naysayers:
if you've ever done real-world web design that requires graphics, you'll realize this is a very important concern. If possible of course you'll want to make your website as scalable as possble. But just as different browsers behave differently (not just IE) and you have to sometimes find a good median solution, you need to do that with screen size, as well. And when you include graphics suddenly percentages go out the window, since many browsers won't resize images very nicely. Bicubic interpolation is nice, but not widely instantiated. Plus do you want to serve huge images that will get scaled down and increase load time like crazy? Or serve small files that when scaled up look crappy? The web is currently a nest of compromises and this concern is just another one. But it's a valid concern to be aware of, and to work into the design if you're at all concerned about "standard" view for a majority of viewers.
Don't forget 240x320. That way your site will be accessible to WiFi connected PDA users.
[Insert pithy quote here]
...you see my next year's resolution!
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc?
Judging by the make of those monitors, I think a truer statement would be "My screen resolution has increased enormously, in line with my disposable income."
Seriously. I do most of my browsing via Links 0.99 on a 21" monitor in text mode.
I tend to use either 1600x1200 or 1280x1024 on GUIs, but that also varies (some of my older 17" monitors are limited to 1024x768).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Advertisements that pay for the operation of a site are measured in pixels. So are images, which look ugly when scaled up or down with the nearest-neighbor algorithm that browsers based on IE and Mozilla use. SVG is scalable, but few web browsers support SVG out of the box, and in any case, photographic images cannot be straightforwardly converted to SVG. How can one make text fit properly around such pixel-sized boxes without using pixel sizes for the text so that neither overwhelms the other?
Sometimes design is about achieving an objective, not catering to everyone at once...
When I get paid $60,000.00 to design an effective website whose objective is to grab your attention and get you to do something you may not have considered until you see the site.. well, standards compliance is not at the top of my list.
Sure it would be nice to do both but often the extra time it takes to make an approved creative design using standards based semantically accurate code JUST ISN'T IN THE BUDGET and often the client doesn't care as long as the majority of their visitors see the site as designed.
As an example I recently had to update a site designed without standards as part of the requirements to a standards based layout due to a change in project management on the clients end (the new manager is a standards nazi IT guy who only cares what the code looks like).... and the site has now become an ineffective marketing tool for the client although it is perfectly standards compliant, with alternate stylesheets font-sizes in small, medium, large, menus as lists, etc. etc. and no tables to be found except for tabular data... but it won't be doing the job it was designed to do... which was to convert people looking for information into customers. In the end the client is not going to be happy with the resulr and they'll have noone to blame but their newly appointed project manager.
Web standards are not required... they are a tool, not the product. I interpret them as saying this: "If you're going to do X then here's a standardized methodology to do so that can be counted on to work." However, if the implementationo of the standards gets in the way of the objective... then they become guidelines that can be followed 100% or 90% or whatever as the job allows.
Finally... if the standards were actually implemented correctly by the viewing devices it would make it a hell of a lot easier to follow them. It's been 5 years or so since CSS2 and XHTML standards were adopted... yet only 90% of them are implemented correctly. Even then there are cases where they just dont' work or you have to jump through multiple hack hoops for them to work which then don't work if viewer X has a non-standard setup or a custiom stylesheet or whatever...
You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time.... sorry if you're in between somewhere...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Heh. Yeah, laptops (at least Dell laptops) have typically been ahead of desktop LCD displays in terms of resolution.
My Inspiron 8200 is 3 years old and 1600x1200 in a 15" screen, and my dad's I8000 was the same in terms of native resolution. My much newer Dell 1800FP is only 1280x1024 with a 18" screen.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I see a lot of "if you're a good web designer, you won't care about resolution, and you'll be smart enough to make your sites resolution-independent" kind of comments in this mix here. Yeah, there's something to that. The web isn't the same as the printed page, after all.
But you'll notice that many--not most, but I'd honestly say the majority--of professionally-designed web sites that are text-heavy do use a fixed width for text blocks. Despite what some people here seem to think, sites that do that are not designed by ignorant graphic designers too stupid to use good design principles. They're designed by graphic designers smart enough to know that "the web isn't the same as the printed page" doesn't mean that everything we've learned in centuries of typography and layout is merrily tossed out.
One of the basic rules of typography is that line length affects readability. You can play around with the length for various effects, but a block of text that's wider than about 39 ems and longer than a paragraph or two is going to be harder to read. This still applies on the screen.
There's an implicit attitude among a lot of hardcore tech types that graphic design doesn't involve actual work -- we're just sitting around stapling Dreamweaver templates over your glorious PHP, and that any design decisions we make that aren't The Way Engineers Would Do It are proof that we're clueless. I'm sorry you guys resent any use of the web that couldn't have been done in HTML 2.0, but it's time to take your hands off the VAX keyboard and back away slowly.
I agree that when you're designing a web page, you shouldn't be thinking too much about the user's screen resolution, but the reality is that I'm probably not going to be designing my page so it will fill up your 2048x1536 display; I'm going to be designing my page so it's going to be readable on your 2048x1536 display. And that may just mean designing for a specific width. Get over it.
Talk to Google. They seem to be doing just fine (if not better than the competition) while using text-only ads.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Why? Because even if I have more screen real estate doesn't mean I want *you* to control it. When I surf, I usually have several windows open, and applications, too. A web site that requires my whole screen blocks my view of the other apps and web sites and, frankly, that just pisses me off.
I don't visit sites that assume they are more important than anything else that I might be doing.
Clear, Dark Skies
Do your HTML/CSS so that your web pages adjust with the size of the browser window.
And watch images scale into a blocky mess when I do img#foo { width: 50% }. Or are you willing to finance the development of a Firefox extension and (more importantly) an IE extension to enable at least bilinear resizing for images? Get bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98971 resolved and I'll believe you.
However, in my experience it's best to make the left and right sidebars fixed and assign the middle space to whatever resolution remains (usually the bulk of it).
But how can I size the left and right bars so that it looks good in a 640-pixel-wide window and in a 1920-pixel-wide window?
Ans: 480x320
Recently I installed wifi at home for my wife's T5 and since then she does about 80% of her browsing on that. It can be a great experience on well designed sites or sites that are handheld specific, but on sites which assume an 800 or 1024 pixel-width, ahem!, I don't normally use that kind of language.
Ability to perform the most basic actions in a web browser is more like ability to understand signs than it is like ability to read a novel. "The most basic actions" do not include shopping, posting on forums and blogs, or even web mail. All you can expect out of a user with street-sign-level proficiency is ability to follow <a href="...">...</a> links and possibly the ability to fill in one- or two-input forms (such as web search or library catalog). Heck, some users I've seen manage to get along without even using the back button.
W3Schools visitors also tend to be people who produce web sites, not people who only consume web sites. People who produce web sites tend to have the means to afford larger displays than people who only consume web sites. This may skew W3Schools' stats upward, as disclaimed in the "Statistics Are Often Misleading" section at the bottom of the "Browser Statistics" page.
[Eyestrain from reading long lines of text from a maximized window on a larger monitor is] ok since the purpose of [a larger monitor] is to have several windows opened on the foreground at the same time anyway
Inexperienced users don't know that. Most of them just hit the maximize button (so that there isn't stuff in the background to distract them) and then complain.
I know a lot of people who are perfectly happy with their old K6-2 and crappy 15" monitor, and have no plans to upgrade while it still functions.
I know of a lot of people who buy a new computer when the old one gets filled up with spyware. Slashdot ran an article about them.
Try 1280 x 960 if 1280 x 1024 doesn't look right.
Trouble is that a lot of paid-for LCDs, especially those bundled with a national-brand computer, don't give the user a choice as to whether to display the incoming signal pixel-for-pixel or to stretch it to fill the screen. Just be glad that most LCDs stretch with bilinear resampling instead of *retch* nearest neighbor.
Talk to Google. They seem to be doing just fine (if not better than the competition) while using text-only ads.
I am already a Google Adsense publisher. All the text ad units that I can choose for my site are sized in pixels.
The most common is "100%". That is, "width: 100%;" in CSS.
Every web developer or designer that uses absolute widths for the page content should piss off and go into typography instead. Nobody is going to be using the same exact resolution, screen size, monitor size, DPI, gamma settings, et al. as you, so don't design things in that way.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
The whole point of HTML is that it doesn't matter what size of screen the viewer has. You set fonts relative to normal, and it just works, because the user can set what they want to be "normal" on their screen.
Likewise, it's possible to design graphics that scale using combinations of repeating patterns and static elements, and it's possible to specify sizes in percentages of the total size, rather than, for example, in pixels.
All this "designed for 1024x768" or whatever is just a sign of bad workmanship or novicehood.
This is the other problem with people assuming fixed-size screens: not everyone maximises their browser. It's perfectly possible to have two browser windows on screen, or to be viewing your browser window inside a split-panel view from your news aggregator, as I'm doing right now. Assuming screen size is just naïve.
I use `links` You insensitive clod.
70e808a22cb027cde4a6abddf6435d55
I use 5120 X 1600, using 2 30" Apple Cinema displays... Yes many websites look ASS STUPID... Because they assume no one has a screen wider than 600.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
If your really good, you won't make this assumption. Of course all websites include logo's etc, so the information you actually need is DPI
What you should instead ask, is how large do I prefer to have my browser windows. And that is as small as possible, because I just hate wide windows. I bought a big screen so I could work with several things at once, not so that moron webdesigners could fill it with crap.
So I guess my answer to your question is 640x480.
Where I work 1600x1200 seems to be the de facto standard, and a fair number of people have a larger virtual screen using multiple displays. However we also all have laptops at 1024x768 or 1400x1024. But we only employ 16,000 people at my site so take that with a grain of salt.
You should still build for 800x600 because ~20% of people still have 800x600 screens and that is (in my opinion) a sizeable enough percentage that you can't ignore it.
I think that 1024x768 has about ~55% and 1280x1024 about ~10%. Unfortunately, these metrics come from querying the browser DOM and most of the analytic vendors report screen resolution instead of browser window size.
As for the people who say you should build their stuff width indepdent, I seriously wonder how much experience you have with corporate web development. It is simply not possible to make an aesthetically pleasing design scale to arbitrary screen sizes more often than not.
Evolution: love it or leave it
Like that? Here's some more image-related problems.
The wide sceens, at least as I use them, are most useful for having multiple windows displayed at the same time, such as the web browser and the text editor to write code, or about a million browser windows. You will very rarely see anyone use a full screen browser window on a 1920x1200 screen. Right now, I'm using about a 1000x900 browser window. Anything bigger than that and pretty much any web site is going to look very strange.
If you want to see this in action, drop by your local Apple retail store. Even in the humblest locations, they have at least one PowerMac G5 connected to a 30" Cinema HD Display (US$2,499) that you can play with.
So I would not worry too much about the 1920 wide case. If you design the site so it looks decent with 800x600-1024x768, you're probably serving those of us who browse at 1920x1200 pretty well.
I wouldn't be too worried about 640x480. From what I understand, it's almost dead and 800x600 is heading that way fast. In actual use, when I have a 1024x768 or smaller screen, I tend to maximize the browser window, so it's really not much differnet from my experience on the huge monitor. Really, a deficiency in height is far more of a problem than width.
Hope that helps.
D
Actually, I had my most expensive monitors years ago. For example, years ago, I bought a NEC Multisync XP21 for $2,500-odd. That's the price of a 30" Cinema Display today. And I have used $5,000 SGI monitors, although at heart they were just Sonys marked up outrageously by SGI.
So it really looks like high-priced monitors have been surprisingly stable in price if you leave out the SGI monitor and its markup. They have just become enormously more capable.
D
I have 1600x1024 (1:1.56). HDTV is 16:9 ratio (1:1.77). A nice Apple display is 2560x1600 (1:1.6). Radar and medical displays can be 2048x2048 (1:1).
It's only ever an issue if you want to play braindamaged games or use a background image, neither of which is very good for productivity. Uh, you do that stuff?
I run 3 headed at 2048x1536 at work, 2 at home. Please don't jam my browser fullscreen on me. I keep my browsers pretty wide too, maybe like 1800-ish by 1300-something, who knows, but it's more than big enough to view anything anyone wants to show me, if you resize my browser (either way, some people make it a little 800x600 postage stamp which is really annoying), I will close your site and never go back.
Unfortunately for me, my home monitors are dying, and it appears you can't buy a decent CRT anymore (Sony doesn't look like they make anything but LCDs, and I am a trinitron nazi, and I will not buy one of these used off eBay). So I guess it will back down to 1600x1200 soon. Still, the offer stands, if you would like me to kick your ass, please feel free to resize my window, or "design for res X". Gotta make that stuff scale.
I like music
... I do think that people with 1920px-wide displays usually don't browse the web w/ a maximized window; that just seems like a tremendous waste of desktop realestate.
I run 1792x1344 at home, and the only applications I have maximized are image editors, spreadsheets, and Word -- but in Word I'm looking at two pages side-by-side.
..this $60,000 website please?
I must see what compnay not to invest any money in if they are that stupid.
- C.
I host a mix of special interest sites, personal webpages, and a commercial site on my server. Mostly non-geek stuff. According to our webcounter, these are our users' resolutions and color depths for the last three months:
39.3% 1024x768 @ 32bit
11.9% 1280x1024 @ 32bit
10.6% 800x600 @ 32bit
9.7% 1024x768 @ 16bit
6.3% unknown (javascript disabled)
3.6% 800x600 @ 16bit
3.5% 1152x864 @ 32bit
3.4% 1280x800 @ 32bit
1.6% 800x600 @ 24bit
1.5% 1600x1200 @ 32bit
1.5% 1024x768 @ 24bit
1.3% 1280x1024 @ 16bit
0.9% 1440x900 @ 32bit
4.9% misc other (not going to bother transcribing)
-- TTK
I have four monitors in my house. They are 1024x768, two 1280x1024's and 1280x768 (on my media center pc). Windows Vista will be enforcing at least 1024x768, just as Windows XP did with 800x600.
If you ever find yourself thinking about pixels or specifying hard widths, stop what you're doing immediately! You are doing it wrong, and you are contributing to the pollution of the World Wide Web with total crap.
The important criterion is not the screen size (you call it resolution, which is patently incorrect, resolution refers to the DPI not the number of pixels). The important thing is how large the display surface is, how much text you can fit on the screen. The number of pixels needs to be mitigated by the DPI, but if you ever refer to pure pixels you fuck that up.
Design your website to be viewable at all screen sizes. Use proportional fonts and percentages. Whatever usability studies you have read referring to skinny columns and multi-column formats, forget. They are for newspapers, a completely separate medium, and whatever you think you many know they are not applicable to the web. People prefer their web pages to have single columns of text that expands in width. If they don't like the width, they resize their fucking window! Always remember that: you do not control their viewing experience, and you should never try.
The key to designing for the web is to have a fluid design. It should smoothly rescale and reflow for any screen configuration. Some users have their screen at 67 DPI, others 133 DPI. Some have 15" displays two feet from their face, others 21" a foot and a half from them. Some are using 30" cinema displays. Apple iMac LCDs tend to have low resolutions, in the 80 DPI range. The Dell laptop I have has almost 40% more pixels in a smaller area, I would guess the DPI to be closer to 120. (It is fucking murder trying to read 10pt fonts on that, since it won't let me change the system DPI due to work lock-downs. I am forced to read Outlook emails on an external display because of that stupidity.) If your webpage doesn't work on a 640x480 and a 1600x1200, both at 67 DPI and 138 DPI, then you aren't finished yet. Keep working until it is fully fluid.
Wrong answer.
The correct answer is to NOT USE FUCKING PIXELS to control the size of the image! Images CAN be sized using inches, centimeters, points, and percentages, you know. If the image is inside a block element (such as, you know, BODY) you can tell it to take 85% of the width and then people can resize their windows as they wish. On large displays, it will show details. On small displays, it will still fit the whole image without scrolling.
Why the fucking hell is this simple idea NEVER EVER USED???
Depends greatly on your target audience. If you're creating a site of AJAX resources for webmasters, it needs to handle resolutions from 1280x1024 up to 3200x2450 or so. Game tips and hits site? More like 800x600 to 1600x1200 or thereabouts.
If your site is of _general_ interest, however, you need to handle, at minimum, everything from 640x480 (lower if you care about cellphone users) up to at least 2048x1500 or so. At the lower end of that range, it's acceptable if the sidebar goes off the edge, but be very careful that the user doesn't have to scroll to read each line of any given column. At 800x600, try to make the entire layout fit within the width of the window. At the higher end, you'll be more concerned with how sparse the site looks and how the whitespace distributes.
Be aware also that higher resolutions are driving users to set minimum font sizes (e.g., nothing less than 16pt) and/or automatic text scaling (e.g., all font sizes 150% of what the page author specifies).
Images are the big problem. It would *really* help layouts if we could specify an image width in % or em units, but if you try that with a png (or any other bitmap format), it looks, in a word, bad. Webmasters at this point are desparately in need of widespread SVG support, but I suspect that it is still 5-10 years from being widespread enough that we can expect to work for enough users that we can use it as a replacement for almost all bitmapped graphics.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.