Minimum system requirements
February 12th, 2007 by Joost SchrierEvery year the level of sophistication of website visitors goes up one notch. Where we had to be very careful with Flash or CSS five years ago we can now safely use them across the board. Where video or byte-heavy images were an absolute no-no in the old days, people are now downloading whole movies at lightning speeds. But does this mean that we can also let go of the long-standing rule which says that all websites should be built with a minimum system requirement of 800 x 600 pixels resolution?
The first place you should look when trying to answer this question is the statistics of websites around the world. This we do regularly of course. A good reference for data like this is always w3chools.com (check it out for yourself to see why). Their data is outlined below:
| 2007 | Higher | 1024×768 | 800×600 | 640×480 | 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% |
W3schools.com takes their data from their own logfiles, but they also monitor other sources around the internet to assure the quality of their figures. When going through the statistics of sites you will see that the differences between sites are large. For instance: if you go to the statistics of tsoshal.org you will see that about 22% of visitors have a screen resolution of 800×600 pixels, but when you go to the statistics of startpagina.nl you can see that the same resolution is used by roughly 9% of the site’s visitors. (Interestingly enough, the percentage of visitors that use a screen resolution of 1024×768 is almost the same around 58%.)
The difference between the statistics of both sites almost certainly has to do with demographics. The website tsoshal.org is the website for “Landhuis Groot Santa Martha” on Curacao and Curacao is not a very developed country internet-wise. The other website (startpagina.nl) is one of the biggest websites in Holland which country is one of the fore-runners of the internet evolution. That makes the moral of these two paragraphs that you can’t trust statistics until you know where they come from and, more to the point, when you design a website you have to take demographics into account.
Going back to the original question; should we still build websites with a minimum system requirement of 800×600 pixels or can we just upgrade to 1024×768? When you look at the statistics you can see that the percentage of people using 800×600 has gone down from 49% in 2002 to 14% in January 2007. Following this trend we can expect that in a few years (5 or 6?) 800×600 is as obsolete as 640×480 is now in most internet-savvy countries, for the other countries it will probably take a few more years.
So, in conclusion we can say that we will still need to build websites with a minimum system requirement of 800×600 pixels because else an unacceptable amount of visitors will not see it correctly. In a few years we will have to look at the demographics of the intended audience to see which minimum system requirement we can get away with.
