Web Dev Chronicles

After Simon Conlin posted a note on Facebook about the prevalance of 1024x768 and the death of 800x600 I thought I'd share some stats from the two primary sites I work on, fitc.ca and nowtoronto.com. The audiences for these sites vary quite a bit and paint a fairly broad picture of net users. FITC is all design nerds, tech geeks, fanboys, early adopters, etc. While NOW is more typical home users, office workers and college kids.

Here's the screen resolution percentages:
NOW
1024x768 – 30.75%
1280x800 – 23.64%
1280x1024 – 11.27%
1440x900 – 9.53%
1680x1050 – 7.93%
800x600 – 3.16%
1152x864 – 2.51%
1920x1200 – 2.38%
1280x768 – 1.67%
320x396 – 1.17%

FITC
1680x1050 – 17.96%
1280x1024 – 17.06%
1440x900 – 15.41%
1280x800 – 13.68%
1920x1200 – 12.46%
1024x768 – 11.94%
1600x1200 – 2.65%
1152x864 – 1.33%
320x396 – 0.74%
800x600 – 0.74%

Observations:

• By next year, FITC will be able to move to 1280x1024.
• In the last year 800x600 has dropped about 10% on NOW.
• As many people view FITC with an iPhone as they do with 800x600 For context, that percentage represents 151(151 for 320x and 151 for 800x) visitors on the FITC site out of 20429.

Flash versions are also worth noting:
NOW
10.0 – 40.14%
9.0 (all revisions) – 54.53%
8.0 – 0.43%

FITC
10.0 – 62.05%
9.0 – 34.49%

And finally, browsers:
NOW
IE – 53.57%
Firefox – 31.36%
Safari – 12.72%
Chrome – 1.1%

FITC
Firefox – 54.92%
IE – 24.38%
Safari – 14.77%
Chrome – 3.30%

I also think a breakdown of IE versions is important when looking at the IE percentages:
NOW
IE 7 – 67.62%
IE 6 – 30.98%
IE 8 – 1.30%

FITC
IE 7 – 70.98%
IE 6 – 26.95%
IE 8 – 1.97%

*Remember, these are percentages of the total share of IE browsers.

I really hope these numbers help some of you convince your managers that you don't need to support 800x600 any more. Or that you can safely target Flash 9 or start building for 10 if you are launching a few months from now.

At the end of the day it's a decision you have to make whether the advantages gained from pushing the limits is worth losing the smaller percentages of users. In most cases, you can still make the site accessible to those people, it may just may not look exactly like your designer intended. This is the approach we've taken on both sites towards IE6 users. The numbers are still a fair amount, but we are better serving all our other users by pushing the capabilities of the browser.

It's also a time/cost decision. I'm the sole developer on nowtoronto.com and much of fitc.ca is done in kind so the man hours aren't there to support older browsers compared to the benefits we gain in maintenance of the site by using current CSS standards.

Next time maybe I'll just the pdf reports right from Google Analytics and save myself some time typing all this out!

UPDATE (March 24th, 2009)!

Since I posted this nowtoronto.com has seen the following trends:

IE use has dropped to 50.58%. This is despite the release of IE8 and at the current rate of decline it will be below 50% in early April. What's replacing it? FireFox picked up only 0.36% of that share, while Safari and Chrome have grown 7.07% and 4.95% respectively. 

I'm also seeing a "Mozilla Compatible Agent/iPhone" that has come from 0 to almost 1% in the past month. This is different from Safari/iPhone. Could this be people using alternative browsers on the iPhone? If so that's awesome!

Flash Player 10 support is now at 49.64%. That's a growth of 9.5%, mostly on the back of the r22 player release.