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."

Comments

ISP website - broad customer base

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:ISP website - broad customer base

[toddbu]

We run a commercial website and have similar stats. For all visitors, 1024x768 = 62%, 800x600 = 24%, 1280x1024 = 8%. We also track paying clients separately, and the numbers are 1024x768 = 55%, 800x600 = 26%, 1280x1024 = 10%. I'm always surprised to see the number of dual monitors that we see (2048x768), although the percentage of overall clients is really small.

Flat Screens Have Reduced The Average Resolution

[szyzyg]

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.....

Re:It shouldn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

"According to confidential Apple documents, resolution independent UI will not be a user level feature in Tiger, nor will it be exposed anywhere in the Tiger user interface. Instead, the company is providing early support of the technology to developers who wish to prep their applications ahead of time, or implement the feature on an individual application basis.

"Documents state that, in future release of Mac OS X, users will be able to set a global resolution scaling factor in the same way that changes to screen resolutions can be made in the system's Displays preferences panel."

http://www.google.com/search?q=resolution+independ ent+UI
http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/GraphicsIm aging/ResolutionIndependentUI.html

This page should be of help...

[shadwwulf]

W3 Schools doesn't just include browser stats. They also track metrics regarding screen resolutions currently in use.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp

MTW

Fixed width is unnecessary

[Bogtha]

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.

Re:Please don't...

[zcat_NZ]

Google can't handle it either; your application/xml+html pages will get treated the same as other 'non-html' documents like application/pdf by google, which really sucks.

If you want some fun serve your pages as text/xml - it's still valid according to the w3c but it makes IE display the pages in the most awesomely broken way!

CRTs have big problems

[r00t]

Here's a good one:

1. face the CRT west
2. measure the color
3. face the CRT east
4. measure the color

Like that? Here's some more image-related problems.

Screen Resolution and Color Depth

[TTK Ciar]

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

Re:From some of my stats here is a breakdown..

[kent_eh]

From a site that I maintain, a model railroad hobby site:

1024x768 44.95%
800x600 36.05%
1280x1024 8.96%
1152x864 4.53%
Other 2.59%
640x480 1.64%
1600x1200 1.24%

And, just for the halibut, from the same site:

Netscape 17.38% - MSIE 82.07% - Other 0.49%
Windows 91.84% - Mac 4.06% - Unix 0.78% - Other 3.30%