
1366×768px overtakes 1024×768px as the most popular screen resolution worldwide - mathias
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/screen-resolution-alert-for-web-developers
======
lini
It all depends on the target market - for example if you are making a site for
gamers, you should look at the Steam HW survey, where 1920x1080 is used by 25%
of people. 1366x768 is a distant second with 15%. Source:
<http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey>

~~~
slewis
Its true you should consider who your users are.

But these numbers shouldn't be used to determine what size to make a website.
I'd guess most people with 1920x1080 monitors don't maximize their browser.

~~~
thangalin
For general websites, I preview the site using:

<http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/>

Many web sites are not designed for people who retain older technology for
financial (or other) reasons. Every web developer should befriend someone over
the age of 60 and watch their surfing habits.

~~~
justinph
While this site is sort of useful for looking at screen size, it gives the
false impression that users don't scroll. They do. Don't ever show this to
anyone that isn't fully aware of this, else you'll fall into the trap of
trying to put everything "above the fold", a terrible prison to escape.

~~~
briandear
Above the fold design is critical from a marketing standpoint. But you're
right, everything doesn't have to be above the fold.. if anything the above
the fold should be designed to encourage readers to scroll below the fold.

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seanp2k2
Sad that our pixel density hasn't gone up since the 90s, really. Tv ruins
people with 42" screens at only 1080p. I'm glad to see that Apple is showing
people that pixel density matters more than resolution alone, and I await
their high-density MacBook displays. Hopefully they'll be out this fall, but a
quick survey of the 4K-rezo landscape suggests that they'll likely have to
wait another year for prices to drop :/

~~~
bo1024
I don't care so much about pixel density; it's the ratio that bothers me.

16:9 is ridiculous for anything except watching HD television. (It also now
works well for gaming, but only because developers decided to cater to
widescreen.)

16:10 is the widest that makes sense for any day-to-day computing tasks, yet
it's getting harder and harder to find; forget reasonable 4:3 types.

~~~
bandy
Depending on my task, I may rotate the 1920x1200 screen in front of me 90° to
1200x1920. I find that much more useful for reading large amounts of text
and/or code. The underlying OS supports it, the monitor arm this display is
mounted on supports it, yet everyone on the job was remarking simultaneously
how odd it was and how useful it seemed as they were shoulder-surfing while I
picked through a large code-base. A full-screen Terminal window on this
monitor in landscape mode is 270x81, which is just plain silly, but 81x270 in
portrait mode is very, very useful.

~~~
r00fus
I have two such rotated displays on my work desk side-by-side to get a 21" x
23.5 combined screen. The problem I get is that viewing angle on average
displays is pretty week in the vertical angle (great, so nudge it up or down
an angle) - but if you put it in portrait mode, this acute viewing angle
really hurts - just moving your chair from one part of the desk to another can
expose it.

Unless you're going with IPS displays, the portrait mode of a monitor is
somewhat compromised.

I still hate 16x9. Please give me back my 4:3.

~~~
miahi
I used a TN display in vertical position for a while and it sucked. If you
moved the head just a little sideways the colors completely changed, and after
a couple of hours I started to feel nausea. My doctor told me it was because
the eyes are seeing different images (each eye saw the display at different
angles, and because of the poor vertical view angles the brain received
different colors and light and had to compensate - like using polarized 3D
glasses). Now I use a combination of vertical + horizontal 16:10 IPS displays
and it's way better. I mostly use the vertical one for web browsing and doc
reading.

------
fierarul
I'm not surprised. Only the "high end" laptops have a resolution that's not
1366x768 in Romania.

I used to have a 14" Dell with a 1600×1200 resolution back in 2008. But in
2012 you really have to pay extra for something like that.

15.6 inch and 1366x768 is just incredible considering the 4 inch iPhone is
960x640 nowadays.

~~~
seanp2k2
14" 1920x1200 here....laptop is from like 2008 (c2d Dell Latitude D830.)

I won't upgrade because the "upgrade" has 1920x1080, and being a Sysadmin,
vertical pixels lost means less lines in my term and more scrolling. It's a
shame that we moved from 16x10 to 16x9 to save a few bucks. Last I checked,
Apple and levovo (w-series) still offer 1920x1200, but my laptop cos $280
used, and the lenovo or MBP would be close to 3 grand.

Sad.

~~~
jgw
I've enjoyed 1920x1200 on my laptops since _2003_ , and I lament this demise,
too. I can't match the resolution I had _nine_ years ago.

I'm a hardware engineer, and the more pixels I can pack into my display, the
more I can see in my waveform viewer. It makes a real difference to me.

I can't say I fully understand the trend to almost-exclusive 16x9, either. I
hear enough people complain about it that I'd have thought there would be a
market for a 15.4" 1920x1200, even if you had to pay a premium for it.

~~~
jseliger
_I can't say I fully understand the trend to almost-exclusive 16x9, either._

I've read that this is because of the influence of TVs: pretty much every LCD
maker is setup to cut panels in this form factor, and there isn't enough
demand to make computer makers change this.

A couple years ago I saw a Lenovo blog post about how they could _consider_
making taller laptop screens if, say, they got $20K pre-orders, but even then
it would've been very, very expensive for the clients, and I don't think the
idea ever went anywhere.

------
tjoff
1024x768 is still the best window-size for browsing (and most other tasks as
well) in my opinion. Don't get any silly ideas of designing a web page for
wider than 1024 pixels (the only thing I miss out today is in the "worst" case
ads).

~~~
Alex3917
"Don't get any silly ideas of designing a web page for wider than 1024 pixels"

Do you think there's anything wrong with fitting the essential information
within 1024 pixels, but then putting non-essential stuff to the right of that?

~~~
OzzyB
I agree with tjoff; just because a majority of users' screensizes are
increasing, doesn't mean we have to keep "upping" the size of our webpages
accordingly.

I don't think the guy that just bought a brand-sparkling new 27" cinema
display really wants all the websites he visits to now start filling his
entire screen -- he bought it to do multiple things at once.

Speaking from experience, I keep all my browsers at around a 1024px viewport
and I get frustrated when I visit a site and need to scroll horizontally.

I think the best target size for webpages is still 1024px with 960px^ as its
main content area size. The 960px grid is still very strong and useful and
there's nothing wrong with it -- I would even go as far as to say that it's a
"standard". (<http://960.gs>).

To me 1024/960 page size is the web's A4/Legal.

^Doesn't _have_ to be 960px obviously...

~~~
Raphael
960 is also half of 1920, for side-by-side viewing, though I'd design a bit
lower in case of window borders and scroll bars.

~~~
Aethaeryn
I agree. This is a use case of browsers that almost everyone misses when they
design websites.

Very few sites aim for 960 as their minimum[1]. I tried side-by-side viewing
on a 1920x1080 monitor and it really didn't work out in most places. Even
parts of Wikipedia (such as tables) will create horizontal scroll bars on
certain articles.

I did notice that a lot of websites aim for 1024 instead of 960 because I saw
many pages that _almost_ fit. Please, if you can aim for 1024, aim for 960
instead.

[1] As the parent post said, it probably isn't quite 960 when you take window
borders into account.

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pogosian
By the way, I'm using 11 inch mba as my main dev machine and here's how to
take advantage of 16x9 displays if you're using emacs:

\- you can split your emacs frame into multiple columns with C-x 3 (and
balance them with C-x +), this way you can see two or even three files side by
side.

\- you can use emacs follow-mode which creates one virtual window split into
multiple buffers, which is very useful for 768px high displays.

~~~
jseliger
That's funny—I was recently trying to see if any non-emacs text editors have
follow-mode or something like it. Textmate, Sublime, and a few others don't.
Really aggravating for someone like me, who finds emacs overkill and as
intuitive as launching a spaceshuttle.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm using a 27" iMac, so I have _lots_ of screen real estate.

------
Duff
It's amazing how segmented the market has become. A few years ago, everyone
pretty much had 1024x768 or 1280x1024.

Now, just about all cheap laptops are 1366x768. Everything else is all over
the map!

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blahedo
I am going to be so angry if[0] this makes web devs start designing for grids
that have to be 1300px wide to work. I don't fullscreen anything (too wide for
the height, and too wide for the font size!), and while the majority of
webpages look just fine in a ~600px wide browser window, possibly after right-
scrolling to put the content column in the window, rarely does a day go by
that I don't have to tear off a tab and widen it---not to make it look good,
but to make it usable _at all_. Like that crappy Bump page posted here earlier
today: if you view it in a narrow window, even if you right-scroll the window
the content is sliced at window-width, with the page absolutely unusable at
anything less than my full screen width. I don't know if there's anyone out
there still on an 800x600 resolution, but there's a significant portion of the
web that they actually can't use in any way. It doesn't have to be that way!

[0]Realistically, I know it's "when", but I'll stick with the denial a little
longer.

~~~
paul9290
Responsive design is what all us designers and front end coders should be
focused on learning and using.

Check out the Starbucks website and manipulate the window size. It
automatically changes stylesheets based on window size.

~~~
blahedo
I love it! The Boston Globe website (boston.com) had at one point demoed a
similarly responsive front page, but they seem to have switched back to their
old annoying format.

------
julianpid
I felt like sharing this info here because it matters to me more than pixel
density or aspect ratio.

It turns out that GPUs like the popular Intel integrated gfx chips requires
each lines of your framebuffer to be 64 bytes aligned. And yet, when using a
1366 wide resolution in 32bit per pixel mode, the visible length in bytes of a
framebuffer is 5464, which is not a multiple of 64.

The operating system circumvent the problem by allocating 5504 bytes for each
line of the framebuffer instead of 5464. It represent a loss of 30KB of unused
memory.

Anyway, you're probably think I'm mad to care about those things instead of
pixel density or aspect ratio, and 30KB is definitely meaningless compared to
the memory footprint of a complete framebuffer (which is around 4-5MB). But
you know these people who can't stand having the volume bar set to an odd
number on their television set ? I'm exactly like them, why in hell would you
not use an horizontal resolution which is not a multiple of 64 ?

~~~
SamReidHughes
> But you know these people who can't stand having the volume bar set to an
> odd number on their television set ?

Um, no?

------
jacobr
screen resolution is a useless number for web developers, browser viewport
dimensions are what matters.

------
andrewfelix
I'm not sure that the data provided by StatCounter is representative of global
trends. They're stat counters are installed on 3 million sites which sounds
like a lot. But if you take a look at the distribution of those sites globally
they're not evenly spread.

You can take a look at their sample size per country here:
[http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-
size/StatCounterGlobalStats...](http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-
size/StatCounterGlobalStatsJan12_SampleSizeCountryBreakdown.csv)

------
jaysonelliot
What about tablets? How does the iPad's 2048 x 1536 resolution work out in the
real world? I assume web sites don't appear in a 1:1 pixel ratio, or a 960
pixel wide site would appear tiny in the browser.

I use the 960 grid from <http://960.gs/> when I build a site, and I find that
sites on my 1680 x 1050 monitor look great at 960 pixels wide.

I would assume that sticking with a 960 pixel wide grid is still optimal, but
I'd love to hear people's points of view.

~~~
jonknee
It still identifies as 1024x768 and will look just like it does on the
previous iPads (albeit with sharper text). It's just like how the iPhone works
the same regardless of retina.

------
kristianp
From the stats page CSV:

    
    
      19.28% 1366x768
      18.6%  1024x768
      12.95% 1280x800
      7.49%  Other
      7.48%  1280x1024 
      6.6%   1440x900
      5.09%  1920x1080
      3.83%  1600x900
      3.63%  1680x1050
      + others from the csv file below 3%
    

That resolution is going to dominate for a while, until retina -style screens
make an influence on the mass market.

I recently moved from 1280x800 to 1440x900 myself.

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coryl
What's the most popular monitor size nowadays? 20"?

~~~
klausa
I'd guess 15" laptop.

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haxdit
Another noob article on Hacker News. Dismissing mobile screens in this count?
How ignorant!

Calling it responsive design? Do your job and show the website on any device.
You noobs are embarrassing. PHP blows, which is probably why you suck so bad.

------
joblessjunkie
"...(*excluding mobile)"

Why exclude mobile?

~~~
chrischen
I'd assume it's so we can know how to target desktop oriented sites.

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RandallBrown
Do these numbers include the iPad?

It seems silly to call the iPad a mobile browser. A website for a phone screen
scaled up to the iPad usually looks ridiculous.

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donohoe
Wonderful. But its really the _window_ that matters, right?

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kelvin0
Wow, I will never be the same person again...Earth shattering

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mathiasben
the marketing wizards dictating design feel consumers want screens with a
letterbox presentation, if it's square it's preceived as old, low-def and
undesirable.

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bond
Laptops taking over desktop PCs...

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zem
i miss 1400x900 :( it was a lot nicer to use in a laptop than 1366x768

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skatenerd
anyone notice the particularly narrow content pane?

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DavidAbrams
WTF? How did this bizarre resolution even become an accepted "standard"? It
emerged with plasma TVs of five years ago or so, and was baffling then. After
that, it started showing up on netbooks. Now it's the most common?

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jbverschoor
So does that mean that everybody's on a 13" macbook?

~~~
FootballMuse
The 11" MBA is 1366 x 768, but the 13" MBA is 1440 x 900. The 15" MBP has been
1440 x 900 since 2006 but in 2010 added an upgrade option to 1680 x 1050.

As far as I know, the 11" MBA is the only Mac to ever offer that resolution.

