How much space is there on peoples screens? Minus toolbars, chrome etc

[flaxmac]

I want to know what are the percentages of people that are using their browsers with just a plain browser setting, or with a google tool bar, or yahoo tool bar, or what ever else people put on their browsers so I can guess-ti-mate how much of the screen I have to play with before a scroll bar kicks in on the screen.

Any ideas?

[BReflection]

A good place to find out about this is the w3schools statistics. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp [w3schools.com]

[tedster]

You know, I don't see the W3Schools collecting that kind of data - in fact I've never seen it anywhere. They measure screen resolution, but that's just part of the picture. What we really need to answer the question thoroughly is client.availHeight.

Given that nearly 30% today are still running at 800x600 - and that top chrome and toolbars on IE can run 150px easily (that's a Google toolbar plus a Yahoo! toolbar on one of my computers) I'd say 420 pixels or so is all you've got to play with.

I've completely stopped any concern about vertical scrolling. In fact, In New Orleans I gave a short talk about "long copy" - where you have 20 or 30 screens of scrolling -- essentially a microsite all on one page. And it really works well whent the copy is solid.

However, I also know that some "image conscious" work cares very much about being less than a screenful. I beleive that Netflix launched their business just that way. Of course, PDAs were not very common then (nothing like a handheld device to mess up your plans!)

[flaxmac]

Thanks for the good input, I suppose that if I told you why I want to know the size to avoid scroll bars it may help. I am using iframes, and if the visitor wants to scroll the page before it is finished loading then it turns into a complete mess for a few seconds.
That is what I am trying to avoid.

Is the google and yahoo toolbar the ones that most people use?

Do you think people would use both at the same time?

How far should I take this just to allow for the 30% of people that use 600 by 800?

What is the percentage of the next size up users and what is that screen size?

[collymellon]

I want to know what are the percentages of people that are using their browsers with just a plain browser setting

Just to answer, I will never have/use an annoying toolbar on my screen but most web users do.

I would say the next percentage is around 40-50% taken by 1024x768, a recent site I produced was under strict orders not to vertically scroll..4 weeks into the project and 10 pages scroll simply because I couldn't get the required content in a presentable way without scrolling.

[MatthewHSE]

Just an idea, but if someone could write a some sort of script that would measure statistics like this, there might be the possibility of getting some decent numbers. For instance, the statistics script could probably write data to a file that would then be retreived on a schedule by a remote server. The remote server would then group the data by site and aggregate it. By signing up your site with the remote server, you could classify it as "tech," "hobby," etc., which could provide better statistics based on audience. Obviously this would not necessarily provide rock-solid statistics, but at least it would be something to go by.

[tedster]

Another stat that such a script could catch would be how many users browse at full screen or with partially sized windows - useful today with so many large screens available (the w3chools stats say 11% are over 1024).

[collymellon]

having said that if I was going to use one it would be the google toolbar - the page ranking bar is very useful

[2by4]

MatthewHSE, that's simple, all you do is have javascript write out a request to a non-existent image, the image is located on the remote server, and is passed the parameters you want to determine, in this case availableHeight/Width + the site type.

To get better results also have it set a session cookie, so only one image request per session is made.

The main issue would be database loads on the remote server, that's a major consideration, but anyone with a dedicated server could easily support that, since the actual bandwidth would be negligible, it's just a question of serverside resource consumption in terms of a lot of db queries.

Not a bad idea though, and very easy to implement, and it would definitely provide the answer to this question in a relatively short period of time, you'd really only need to run the script once in a while, since statistically the percentages really won't change that much day to day, week to week, month to month.