Does anyone know what the current screen (monitor) resolution stats are? I'm going to redesign my website and I'm wondering what the percentage of people are still using the 800 x 600? Obviously this site is going to be for the masses and not just the tech/design industry.

Any thoughts?

My forum (www.bikepower.nl) is for motorcylce fanatics. Most of them are happy they can type. Stats for that site show 1.06% use 800x600. 1024x768 is the most used resolution.

Well, my site gets 3.5% visitors on 800*600. A decent slice of my traffic is from forums, however.

The Wikipedia article says 8%, but that's based on w3Schools and hence very likely to under-represent low-resolution numbers.

If you're going for a truly fixed-width design, I would suggest 1024*768. I wouldn't want to force everything inside 750-ish pixels. Of course, you could always design for 1024*768 and then allow the site to squash...

I think the 800x600 users are used to horizontal scrolling by now

Screen res are nice and all but it doesn't mean the user actually has his browser maximized.

Here are some of my Mint stats to actually shows the browsers width.
 mint_stats.jpg ( 40.56K ) Number of downloads: 12


95% have their browser width to more than 960px
99% to more than 744px (thank God)



So... even if 1024 is a popular screen res width, doesn't mean it's the browsers width

With a little bit of JS you can have a nice semi-flexable layout with gets smaller to a limit and stop expanding at a limit. It's a nice effect and with JS turned off you just set it to a default width.

That said it will be nice when IE6 finally dies so I don't have to use JS.

[off-topic level="slightly"]

There is a really nice min-height hack I found which someone here might find usefull at some point.
Clickty Click
[/offtopic]

Thank you!! I think I've decided to go with 960 px in width. That will give me a bit of margin on each side. I love a little margin. And for the few on the smaller screens, there will be a little less scrolling.


Does that sound reasonable?

Have you been going to the 960 Grid System site

Nah... you know I don't surf the net!
Never even heard of that.

But someone on Twitter gave me a bit of reading material and I thought it was good advice.

You can just give IE6 a basic fixed-width layout, and offer better browsers the flexible layout.

I suppose, maybe just link a crappy invalid stylesheet for IE6 (with JS behaviour) and use normal for other browsers.

Can't believe I didn't think of that. Then again if I did that I'd have a mob of standards fanatics trying to break the door down.

That's pretty much my approach:

• IE6 and IE7 get special instructions via conditional comments: extra CSS, sometimes javascript fixes, and occasionally even extra markup.
• I don't care whether this IE-specific code (CSS/HTML) is valid. I also don't care whether it "makes sense". It just has to work.
• If some non-critical IE error is especially difficult to fix, then I just ignore it or replace it with a more primitive alternative. I don't expect to get everything perfect in IE -- just good enough.
• All other browsers get 100% valid CSS and HTML Strict.
• I do not allow my IE hacks to affect other browsers. The hacks are self-contained: I first use the standards-based method for good browsers, and then hack for IE.

There's no purpose trying to validate IE-specific hacks. The purpose of writing standards-based code is to get consistency among browsers; browser-specific hacks are the antithesis of web standards, and therefore it's absurd to expect them to validate.

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how ugly my IE hacks are. I support IE6 and IE7 only because they own most of the market share.

Eventually, Internet Explorer will catch up with the other browsers (see IE8 beta 2!). Standards are always being augmented with new capabilities, and no browser supports them all immediately. The problem is that IE has lagged far behind the other browsers for a long time, effectively crippling our ability to adopt new methods -- or at least adding a heavy development burden from hacking.

You are talking about Resolution stats but it depends what site you are running.

My games forum tents to have widescreen and are more cleaver and use firefox. And the number of mac and linex is so low (0.5%)

This post has been edited by Simon: Sep 30 2008, 10:14 AM