Back in the olden days of the internet (circa 1999), people used to slap stickers on their websites: “Best viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer,” they would say, or “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator.”
Someone came up with a joke in response: “For best viewing experience, come round to my place and look at this site on my monitor.”
Which was a joke but also made a very fair point: everyone thinks that the internet looks the same no matter what computer you’re using; but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Different browsers do different things with the same HTML code. And different computers do different things with plug-ins and multimedia content and Flash. And, most troublesome of all, every different computer screen has a certain number of pixels it can use to display stuff. For web developers, that means the pages we make will look huge on some screens and much smaller on others.
That means we have to tread carefully when building websites. We have to find an average, something that’s going to look a decent size for the majority of people.
Google – funny how we keep coming back to Google, but it is so huge and so dominates today’s internet that it’s hard not to – has the resources to research this sort of thing, and has released a wonderful tool called Browser Size.
It has up-to-date statistics on the average window size used by people surfing the web. Give it the URL of a web page and it displays it with a graphical overlay, showing average web browser window sizes like contours on a map. You can adjust the size of your own browser window to match the contours, and see a site as some of your visitors might see it.
The results are shocking, even for professionals like us. They’re a timely reminder that web development is a constant balancing act; and that sometimes, going round to someone else’s place to see a website on their monitor might not be a bad idea.
