A small majority of users have 1024x768 and higher. A large minority have 800x600. A very small and shrinking number, 1%, have 640x480. These numbers do not include those who browse using web appliances.

It is important to note that users can normally resize the browser window, hence no particular browser window size should be assumed.

A good way to ensure that sites will work for as many resolutions as possible is to design sites to be resolution-independent, i.e. not to specify widths in absolute units (e.g. pixels) unless a width is that of a fixed-width object, e.g. a GIF, JPG, or PNG image.

These are resolutions of special interest to website designers:

544x372 (MSN-TV / NTSC): there are about a million MSN-TV users, but no good stats of how many pages they access: it does seem likely that these users account for 1% of page accesses. This should change little in the short term, as the number of users has changed little for several years: longer term changes depend on how avidly consumers embrace such appliances, and on how well MSN-TV competes with similar products.

640x480: this accounts for 1% of page accesses, a third as many as a year ago. Most users have old PCs. The number will quickly drop as these PCs are retired.

800x600: this accounts for 32% of page accesses. Some users surely have old PCs, with little video memory; the rest likely have PCs whose resolutions are set lower because many new PCs default to a lower resolution: lower resolution displays are faster. The percentage will decrease steadily as higher resolution displays grow more common, but will remain popular for many years.

1024x768 and higher: this accounts for 65% of page accesses. Most new PCs have enough video memory for high resolution displays, but many are set to a lower resolution because many new PCs default to a lower resolution: lower resolution displays are faster. The percentage of high resolution users will continue to grow steadily.

Other: other resolutions are found among net appliances and some PCs. For example, one video resolution is normally 1280x1024, however, it can be tilted 90°, making the resolution 1024x1280.