A few bloggers have recently been getting all excited about the (allegedly) "really useful" site: What's my Browser Size?
The stats in the left margin seem totally bogus to me. Even if you were running your brower in a maximised window on a 1024x768 display, the browser window would not be that big and the usable space for displaying a web page would be even less. I guess what they really mean is desktop size.
The companion site which enables you to resize the browser to see how a page would look at a particular screen resolution seems even more useless. Once again it assumes everyone will run their browser windows maximised and it also completely disregards the random changes to system font, toolbar, and widget sizes which happen when you change your screen resolution under Windows.
Here's a hint for any web designers out there. The size of my browser window is my business. The less you concern yourself with that, the happier we'll both be.
As somebody who has done a bit of webdesign, I agree that your browser window size is your business. But is it solely your business?
When designing the visual presentation of a page, it is sometimes neccessary to determine at very least a minimum width in pixels that the page can scale to. (This is often because of the use of raster images; vector image support in many browsers isn't quite where we'd like it yet.) I'm sure you'd rather not have to read a site where the length of each line of text extended past the horizontal edge of your browser, forcing you to horizontally scroll back and forth to read everything. (This could happen if an image or group of images pushed the width that big.)
I'm not saying websites should change the size of your browser window; just that being able to know audience statistics is useful for one of the possible constraints neccessary to design around.
That said, I absolutely agree that providing stats just of monitor resolutions is nearly useless. The fallacy that a browser window, or indeed any window, will take up the whole screen may be a result of many Windows users doing so because of a poorly designed window manager.
I also take the position that the practice of arbitrarily limiting the width of a column of text to a certain number of pixels so that people with maximized browsers on huge screens can read it more easily is horrible. People are indeed entitled to size their browser window appropriately so that they can comfortably read text.
Also, this entire comment is made with the assumption that we're talking about designing the visual presentation of a page. If a web designer only constructs a page with the assumption that it will be viewed in a graphical visual browser on a large screen, they are ignoring many other uses and users of the page.
