Saturday, August 30, 2008

How Do You Browse? Take My Poll!

by Computer screen technology has seen big improvements in the last few years. Old, bulky tube-based monitors, once the only type of monitor available, are nearly extinct. Flat panels have become big, cheap, and ubiquitous. Average screen resolutions are larger than they've ever been before. According to OneStat, as of April 2007, only 8% of online computers were set to an 800x600 screen resolution or lower.

Larger screens allow you to fit more on the screen at once. You can put documents side by side, open more palettes, or view more photos at once. They give you a lot more room to stretch out.

There's a feature in Windows that was added before there were high-resolution screens: the 'maximize' button. It's the button at the top right corner of every window that stretches the window to completely fill the screen, allowing the use of only one window at a time. The maximized mode (or single-window mode) is still popular, even on the big 24 to 30 inch screens.

My follow-up post will touch on the implications maximized windows on big screens have for web developers. Before that, I'd like to conduct a little (non) scientific poll. The information from this poll is valuable because it comes from all of you: a wide range of real people reading articles on the web.



(By the way, did you know a few months ago a feature was added to Google Docs that allows you to create forms that can be emailed or embedded on a web page? The data from the form is put into a Google Spreadsheet. I decided to use this poll to demonstrate how useful this feature can be. To learn more, follow the link just below the form.)