Screen Resolution Trends

[Don Erickson]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> It's important to remember though that the 800x600 screen reaches both the
> 1024 and the 1280 user though, giving it an overwhelming market share,
> while the 1024 and larger screens "miss" the lower resolution market.

Oh, I'm certainly not suggesting that pages don't have to display properly
on 800x600 screens.  I guess that I'm suggesting, due to the wide range of
resolutions that most people are using, that static-sized pages should be
depricated and authoring dynamically-sized pages should be more of a
priority.  I had three hits at 3820x1024 resolution.  What the heck is
that, a wide screen TV?

This is what I've got so far for April, s_wt is screen width, s_ht is
height:

mysql> select s_wt,s_ht,count(s_wt) from screenres where date rlike
'2005-04' group by s_wt;
+------+------+-------------+
| s_wt | s_ht | count(s_wt) |
+------+------+-------------+
| 1024 | 768  |        2932 |
| 1056 | 792  |           2 |
| 1120 | 840  |          10 |
| 1152 | 864  |         220 |
| 1267 | 993  |           1 |
| 1280 | 1024 |         785 |
| 1344 | 840  |           6 |
| 1400 | 1050 |          79 |
| 1440 | 900  |          38 |
| 1536 | 960  |           2 |
| 1600 | 1200 |          94 |
| 1680 | 1050 |          29 |
| 1792 | 1344 |           2 |
| 1800 | 1440 |           1 |
| 1920 | 1200 |          18 |
| 2048 | 768  |           9 |
| 2304 | 864  |           2 |
| 240  | 320  |           2 |
| 2560 | 1024 |           2 |
| 560  | 420  |           1 |
| 640  | 480  |          25 |
| 768  | 1024 |           1 |
| 800  | 600  |        1213 |
| 819  | 614  |           1 |
| 832  | 624  |           5 |
| 960  | 600  |           2 |
| 969  | 768  |           1 |
| 998  | 701  |           1 |
+------+------+-------------+
28 rows in set (0.06 sec)


I am also aware that my suggestions traditionally have a null effect on
reality.  I just thought it was interesting, and I haven't seen this
data presented anywhere.

It was a big shift when the "conventional web wisdom" abandoned the
640x480 screen resolution.  I don't see that happening to the 800x600, but
the range is so wide now that dynamically-sized pages are certainly the
way to go in the future, and the present.

But then, I'm still waiting for the browser that renders vector graphics.


Regards,

-Don