What is the trend in browser usage, display colors and screen resolution?
Web Statistics and Trends
Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics below is that most users are using a display with 1024x768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. This fact indicates that the figures below might not be 100% realistic. The average user might have display screens with a lower resolution.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files over five years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.
Display Resolution
The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more:
| 2007 | Higher | 1024x768 | 800x600 | 640x480 | Unknown |
| January | 26% | 54% | 14% | 0% | 6% |
| 2006 | |||||
| July | 19% | 58% | 17% | 0% | 6% |
| January | 17% | 57% | 20% | 0% | 6% |
| 2005 | |||||
| July | 14% | 55% | 25% | 0% | 6% |
| January | 12% | 53% | 30% | 0% | 5% |
| 2004 | |||||
| July | 10% | 50% | 35% | 1% | 4% |
| January | 10% | 47% | 37% | 1% | 5% |
| 2003 | |||||
| July | 8% | 43% | 44% | 2% | 5% |
| January | 6% | 40% | 47% | 2% | 5% |
| 2002 | |||||
| October | 6% | 38% | 49% | 2% | 5% |
Web developers be aware: Many users still have only 800x600 display screens.
Color Depth
The current trend is that most computers use 24 or 32 bits hardware to display 16,777,216 different colors.
Older computers and laptops often use 16 bits display hardware. This gives a maximum of 65,536 different colors.
Handheld computers (and very old computers) often use 8 bits color hardware. This gives a maximum of 256 colors.
| 2007 | 16,777,216 | 65,536 | 256 |
| January | 86% | 11% | 2% |
| 2006 | |||
| July | 85% | 13% | 2% |
| January | 81% | 16% | 3% |
| 2005 | |||
| July | 77% | 20% | 3% |
| January | 72% | 25% | 3% |
| 2004 | |||
| July | 69% | 28% | 3% |
| January | 65% | 31% | 4% |
| 2003 | |||
| July | 55% | 40% | 5% |
| January | 51% | 44% | 5% |
| 2002 | |||
| October | 49% | 46% | 5% |
