Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part II

Posted on July 03, 2000

in Site Development

by Adrian Roselli (aardvark)

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Adrian Roselli

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User since: December 13, 1998

Last login: September 01, 2006

Articles written: 48

In Part I of this article I showed you how to write your own script(s) to track the screen resolution, browser viewable size, and bit-depth, of your users. While you are gathering your own statistics, I'll offer mine up for review.

The site for which I gathered these statistics is http://algonquinstudios.com/. It is the web site for my company, Algonquin Studios. It is not a portal site, or really any other kind of traditional destination on the web. It is a site that offers corporate information. Much of the site traffic comes from searches on Yahoo! and Snap for web development, enterprise application development, and various other software and web-related topics. A good deal of traffic comes from client sites, including a popular local not-for-profit. The rest of the traffic have no referrers and most likely are existing clients, leads, or people who just check on us every now and then (competitors, partners, friends, etc.).

I started with 1,000 records, and discarded 14 that had no data. There are some records that have questionable data, but only those with a bit-depth of '0'. So that left 986 good records on which I based these results. What I've done is break the data down per resolution tier. But first I will cover the aggregate data.

The window width and height represent the viewable space within the window, not the actual window size. Instead of guessing who had what tool bars open, it seemed easier to just capture the actual usable real estate. Please keep that in mind as you view these numbers.

All Users

	Screen Width	Screen Height	Bit-Depth	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height
Mean	941	705	21	806	485
Median	1,024	768	16	783	446
Mode	1,024	768	16	780	602

Highest	2,560	1,024	32	1,372	1,014
Lowest	640	480	0	80	51

I've also created this handy chart to show you the actual numbers and percentage breakdowns of each resolution that visited the site. The x-axis represents the screen resolution, and the y-axis represents the number (of 986) and percent of users at that resolution.

640 x 480 (56 users, 5.7%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	600	304	17
Median	620	314	16
Mode	620	314	16

Highest	636	420	32
Lowest	416	156	1

800 x 600 (393 users, 39.9%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	719	397	20
Median	779	420	16
Mode	780	434	16

Highest	843	524	32
Lowest	80	96	8

832 x 624 (11 users, 1.1%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	756	442	21
Median	761	455	16
Mode	764	422	16

Highest	811	487	32
Lowest	669	365	8

1,024 x 768 (402 users, 40.8%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	881	539	22
Median	918	579	16
Mode	1,004	602	16

Highest	1,028	768	32
Lowest	80	51	8

1,152 x 870 (62 users, 6.3%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	925	630	25
Median	889	667	32
Mode	836	696	32

Highest	1,148	731	32
Lowest	659	364	0

1,280 x 1,024 (41 users, 4.2%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	963	710	22
Median	932	755	24
Mode	1,260	597	32

Highest	1,276	886	32
Lowest	708	347	0

1,600 x 1,200 (18 users, 1.8%)

	Window Inner Width	Window Inner Height	Bit-Depth
Mean	960	755	25
Median	883	758	28
Mode	883	771	32

Highest	1,372	1,014	32
Lowest	751	480	16

Other Users

There are also a few records that had unique settings. They are as follows:

One user with monitor resolution of 767 x 553 x 32-bit. Viewable browser area was 763 x 442.
One user with monitor resolution of 960 x 720 x 16-bit. Viewable browser area was 940 x 578.
One user with monitor resolution of 2,560 x 1,024 x 16-bit. Viewable browser area was 628 x 623.

Finally

Some of you who are better number crunchers than I may be interested in looking at the log. Some of you may want to verify what I've found. You can get your own copy of the log, with IP addresses removed.

You will note some odd numbers above every now and then. Some browsers reported '0' as the bit depth. This is most likely incorrect, but I have left the data in there instead of dumping the whole record. A bit-depth of '1', however, is quite possible. You will also note that while bit-depths can come as 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, and 32, some charts show a mean bit-depth of 17, or some other number. This is an average. I leave it up to the user to determine whether or not he/she would round it up or down. In these cases, the median or mode would be more useful.

Some related articles

A founder of evolt.org, Adrian Roselli (aardvark) is the Senior Usability Engineer at Algonquin Studios, located in Buffalo, New York.

Adrian has years of experience in graphic design, web design and multimedia design, as well as extensive experience in internet commerce and interface design and usability. He has been developing for the World Wide Web since its inception, and working the design field since 1993. Adrian is a founding member, board member, and writer to evolt.org. In addition, Adrian sits on the Digital Media Advisory Committee for a local SUNY college and a local private college, as well as the board for a local charter school.

You can see his personal portfolio at http://roselli.org/.

Adrian authored the usability case study for evolt.org in Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself, published by glasshaus. He has written three chapters for the book Professional Web Graphics for Non Designers, also published by glasshaus. Adrian also managed to get a couple chapters written (and published) for The Web Professional's Handbook before glasshaus went under. They were really quite good. You should have bought more of the books.

While you're reading, a friend of mine has just launched her site, and you should take a look. Kristen Kos, a lovely and talented actress, now has her own site with her acting resume and some new head shots.

6 comments on this article. Log in to add your comment | Rate this article:

Another good article

Submitted by aardvark on March 17, 2001 - 12:07.

WebReview.com has a good article, The Myth of 800x600, which references this one and goes into some more detail about how to build pages for all resolutions, and how to recognize that people don't always surf full-screen. And his chart is more useful than mine.

More references

Submitted by aardvark on March 31, 2001 - 14:13.

It would seem the WebReview article isn't the only one referencing this one. Human Factors International also cites it in their March UI Design Update Newsletter. It has a couple other handy links as well.

Biased Web Log

Submitted by slkyslm on November 22, 2002 - 14:36.

As I looked at the log, I noticed the astonishing number of Mozilla users. In fact almost every user was using the Mozilla browser, implying that your sample audience was much more technically advanced than the average user. Not that Mozilla is difficult to use, but Mozilla tends to be used by those knowledgeable about the open source community. So this implies that your sample audience was almost entirely developers/programmers. It is also true that those that tend to spend much more time at a computer (developers, etc) tend to have nicer equipment (bigger displays). My conclusion is that your data is quite skewed, due to your target sample which is far different from the average user.

Erm, you misread the log...

Submitted by aardvark on November 22, 2002 - 14:54.

All MSIE browsers identify themselves as Mozilla/compatible. This annoying habit of theirs started when they were trying to break into the browser world. So the following sample stats are actually MSIE:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.5; Mac_PowerPC
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; AOL 4.0; Windows 95; DigExt)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT)

Whereas the following browsers are all Netscape 4.x versions, even though they have Mozilla in the browser string (which they've had since version 1), so they aren't based on the Gecko engine:

Mozilla/4.5 [en]C-CCK-MCD BA45DSL (Win98; U)
Mozilla/4.72 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; I)
Mozilla/4.61 [en] (WinNT; I)
Mozilla/4.05 [en] (WinNT; U)
Mozilla/4.7 (Macintosh; I; PPC)

If you go through those logs again, you should find ~85%+ using MSIE on Windows, and the rest generally using Navigator 4.x. The traffic to our site is decidedly not developers for the most part, and when it is (based on a Google search for a technical question that brings them to one of my articles), my logs show they come in to the article (missing the splash page that did the logging) and leave, rarely surfing the rest of the site.

So, given that information and a few minutes to surf through the logs, I hope you'd agree that your assertion isn't quite right. At all. Either way, though, this data is 2 years old and based on my site, not yours, so I'd suggest implementing it to see what numbers you get.

Deciles may be more significant

Submitted by mts0987 on February 27, 2003 - 17:21.

I keep coming back to this article. Thank you for writing it, Aardvark. One thing that I think you might consider is that mean and median may be the wrong values to look at. It may be more interesting to look at deciles. Suppose we are asking where we should consider the page 'fold' to lie. Breaking the numbers into deciles is revealing:

10% 314
20% 387
30% 413
40% 430
50% 446
60% 524
70% 580
80% 601
90% 642
100% 1014

Although the mean (485) and median (446) will tell you what "typical" viewers are seeing, if your measure of success is designing in a way that addresses 9 out of 10 of your visitors, you would want to set the fold at 314. That's a huge difference from the mean or median. It's also interesting to note that there is a 70 pixel jump from the first to the second decile, but only a 26 pixel jump from the second to the third. This tells you that if you are willing to lower your inclusiveness standard to satisfying 4 out of 5, you can get a decent amount more screen space. Conversely, if want to satisfy 95% of your visitors, you really can't consider anything more than 280 pixels from the top as "above the fold". (At least, this was true of this site's visitors in July 2000.)

Anyway, something to think about. Thanks again.

--Mike

Statistics

Submitted by Markavian on September 7, 2003 - 14:35.

Thats an interesting set of results. Certainly useful, and probably still relavent, at least for highlighting the fact that not everyone uses, or is capable of viewing the same resolution.

I didn't do stats at school, but I feel Adrian did a fair job of interpretting his results.

I agre with Mikes deciles, I've never heard of deciles, but I feel hes right.
His analogies at the end about increasing/decreasing your fold line to include/displace users for an increase in colour range/screen area is certainly highly applicable.

With a more recent survey of results (perhaps from more sites), and a decent interpretation of statistics, users could be positively informed of "Whats out there" and then left to make up their own decisions for their own needs. (Without conforming to an ideal) (as seems the argument in "Liquid Design for the web").

- Markavian

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