IE, Firefox, and Screen Resolutions

It is important to know something about your visitors. Included in the list of things you should know is what browsers visitors use and what screen resolutions people are running.

On one of my sites that gets a lot of traffic the browser usage is as follows:
Internet Explorer: 84.85%
Firefox: 10.87%
Safari: 2.94%

In designing my websites I make sure that it displays well in Firefox and Internet Explorer. I am not overly concerned with Safari since less than 1 in 30 people are using it.

Over the last few years Firefox has been gaining market share and for good reason. Firefox gives you the ability to add extensions to the browser.

There are extensions to assist with Blogging, RSS, and website development.

One of my favorite extensions is the “Ad Blocker” which when installed blocks nearly all banner ads.

Firefox extensions can download:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1
Now we need to spend a minute talking about screen resolutions. According to statistics from my websites about visitors’ screen resolutions about 14% or 1 in 7 people are running 800×600 screen resolution.

Knowing this I usually try to make my websites no wider than 760 pixels. This leaves a few extra pixels for the vertical scroll bar.

Doing this ensures that people running 800×600 screen resolution never have to scroll to the left or right.