What is today's most popular screen resolution?

Question

Is there a place that displays statistics in such a manner that I can rely on? e.g. Google/Microsoft homepage screen size statistics? An international statistics organization that checks multiple websites to come up with a more accurate number?

Answer 1

Google previously had a tool at browsersize.googlelabs.com which is now shut down. Not sure that Microsoft currently shares this type of data either.

Here are a couple popular website statistics plugins used on a large number of websites that publish aggregated statistics which might be helpful:

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-ww-monthly-201412-201505

From these charts you can see that no screen resolution individually makes up a majority of users as it might have in the past. Even the resolution with the highest share (1366x768) does not break the 30% mark in either of these statistics websites. Statistics from websites that I work on support these results as well.

I assume you are looking into browser sizes for the purpose of web design/development. In recent years the focus has turned towards responsive web design (RWD) due to the ever increasing usage of smartphones and tablets to access the web. Designing for just one particular resolution is not as viable as it was in the past because of this.

Answer 2

Actually you mean resolution, not screen size, and it may not be a relevant datum nowadays.

I'd say that most popular resolution is actually somewhere between 240*320-ldpi and 1080*1920-xxhdpi which are smart-phone resolutions.

As for desktop computer's resolutions, you can find statistics in the w3schools website, updated from 2000 to 2015.

In any case, think responsively, good front-end design should work in any screen size, from intelligent watches to stadium plasmas.

Answer 3

There are two measurements at work here, screen resolution (the physical hardware/software combination of what the screen is capable of) and the Viewport size, what Google calls the "Browser Size" (which is now available as a variable in Google Analytics. Comparing Screen Resolution with Browser Size is quite insightful. I don't think Screen Resolution is helpful for the web, as the web is really about a browser window and what you can do with that. Especially on the desktop, many do not use a browser window full-screen.