But like a few of you have mentioned, that is screen size, not browser. For 2007, I will hold my ground at around 780px unless the client insists or the target audience allows us to go higher.

Fact is, most surfers are not designers and have different habits surfing the web. Statistics show that around 10% of a sites visitors have a screen resolution of 800×600. As a designer, you may not care for those guys, since obviously they are not aesthetically inclined and are unable to appreciate your work.

But think: Anyone trying to make money from a website will get nightmares, if you tell him that he is losing as much as 10% of his customers, because they can’t see the add-to-shopping-cart-button. What insane braindamaged idea is that? Losing 10% of his revenues? Your client (the company paying you to design the website that will get them paying customers) will not only fire you but tell everyone they know that you are stupid as butter. He is fighting to increase his sales by two percent compared to last year, and you want to lose him ten percent?

For many clients (and their websites) the question is not about “most people”, but about “as many customers as possible”.

A client also asked me why her site didn’t stretch across the screen like Amazon did? My answer is always the same, I referred her to the bbc.co.uk and ft.com, there is a reason that these sites are set to 800×600 and they are prime examples of compliant standards sites that have to cater to a wide audience – yet still have to be fresh, interesting and easy to use. I am against designing fluid sites as by their nature I am unable to control what the user sees, am I a control freak? possibly.

You can build sites now that are density independent, everything in ems, using flash for vector graphics, bitmaps are the difficult bit and then scale the website by user preferences or by javascript according to browser window width.

Alternatively you can wait till page zooming appears in FF and Safari. It already exists and works well in Opera and not so well in IE7.

It depends on your users totally – and the mfg’s of basic computers pushing out 1024 instead of 800 – that way normal users would be just fine for us… :)

But here is why I will be sticking to 80×600. The way content displays on the web at that resolution, is perfect for the human eye. It makes a page easy to scan, forces you (and the client) to not clutter the page (we all know how clients always try to do that), and overall just looks nicest. Unless it’s a news site, a blog, or some online app or portal. If you need more room than the 8×6 window allows you, you may be doing something wrong (consult your information architect at that point).

I will leave you with this example, a newspaper. Newspapers are designed to make readers follow the paper a certain way. They are designed to fit a certain amount of leadin storied on the front page, and the inside pages are also designed a certain way for users. Maybe in 20 years (yes, I bet papers will still be around then) humans will on average have much longer arms, so why won’t they double the size of newspapers to accomodate people with longer arms? Because the papers will become a nightmare to read at that point. “Imagine that, now we can double the amount of stories in the paper” only people may miss a lot since paragraph lines will be longer therefore harder to scan, etc.