What is the trend in browser usage, display colors and screen resolution?
Statistics are important information. What you can read from the statistics below is that most users are using a display with 1024x768 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. This fact indicates that the figures below might not be 100% realistic. The average user might have display screens with a lower resolution.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files over five years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.
The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more:
Date | Higher | 1024x768 | 800x600 | 640x480 | Unknown |
January 2008 | 38% | 48% | 8% | 0% | 6% |
January 2007 | 26% | 54% | 14% | 0% | 6% |
January 2006 | 17% | 57% | 20% | 0% | 6% |
January 2005 | 12% | 53% | 30% | 0% | 5% |
January 2004 | 10% | 47% | 37% | 1% | 5% |
January 2003 | 6% | 40% | 47% | 2% | 5% |
January 2002 | 6% | 34% | 52% | 3% | 5% |
January 2001 | 5% | 29% | 55% | 6% | 5% |
January 2000 | 4% | 25% | 56% | 11% | 4% |
The current trend is that most computers use 24 or 32 bits hardware to display 16,777,216 different colors.
Older computers and laptops often use 16 bits display hardware. This gives a maximum of 65,536 different colors.
Handheld computers (and very old computers) often use 8 bits color hardware. This gives a maximum of 256 colors.
Date | 16,777,216 | 65,536 | 256 |
January 2008 | 90% | 8% | 2% |
January 2007 | 86% | 11% | 2% |
January 2006 | 81% | 16% | 3% |
January 2005 | 72% | 25% | 3% |
January 2004 | 65% | 31% | 4% |
January 2003 | 51% | 44% | 5% |
January 2002 | 43% | 50% | 7% |
January 2001 | 37% | 55% | 8% |
January 2000 | 34% | 54% | 12% |
Read more about the display of colors