For years, innovation in the web stagnated with the sheer dominance of a single web browser. While the user base of internet explorer 6 is in decline and most home users have switched to more web standards compliant browsers, there is another aspect holding back the development of the web, the screen resolutions of the monitors we use to browse the web and the widescreen aspect ratio of most new displays.
According to netmarketshare a cumulative percentage of web users who are using the web using a screen with a resolution of less that 1366 in width is roughly 61%, a majority. The most popular resolution? The legacy 1024 x 768, unsurprising considering most corporate machines are dated, difficult to upgrade, and using legacy software. As a result, web designers are specified to build all their websites with a fixed text width of no more than 1024 pixels wide, some sites will add adverts and a coloured background or maybe an extension of the background image which would otherwise be cropped to fill the additional screen real estate. There are many good reasons for maintaining a screen width of 1024 pixels wide, if the line of text is too long for example, our attention spans quickly fade, hence why newspaper columnists tend to split their articles into many columns on the same page.
Thinking of buying a new pc? Whether its a laptop, netbook or desktop pc, one thing in common is that manufacturers are all trying to squeeze as many pixels as possible into your new screen, resulting in ever higher screen resolutions. When your browser is in a maximized window (which lets face it, unless you’re on a mac running safari, that is the most likely form in which you’ll be browsing the web), there are a notable number of sites that do take advantage of this increased screen resolution including most forum based websites, google maps, vimeo, and igoogle to name a few. What is wrong with magnifying you may ask, well, as a temporary solution, while the scaling of text is fine, scaling images and web elements to larger screen sizes results in compression artifacts, and if you’re watching flash based video, this additional scaling may also increase the processor load. Most modern browsers today, chrome, safari and firefox enable you to easily zoom the web page, but you must do this for every new tab you open, an arduous task, the next version of chrome will memorize the zoom level of the page, a software fix though is just a temporary solution.
The 16:9 aspect ratio has become the most common aspect ratio of new screens sold, thanks to the influence of television, the 16:9 aspect ratio works great for watching dvds and video content, but what about actually everyday use of our computers? While I don’t have solid statistics, its said that the majority of computer users today use it for browsing the web or an office software package. Reading a web-page or writing a letter is a top to bottom activity, and results in wastage of the side portions of the screen, especially if you have a screen resolution of lets say 1600 x 900 where there is no easy solution to lets say just have two browser windows next to each other edit two portrait documents at once with screen resolutions wider than 1920 x 1080. What about rotating your display you may ask? For monitors of the legacy aspect ratio, a 3:4 aspect ratio made great sense, but a 9:16 aspect is just far too tall for common use and presents far greater difficulty in engineering. Apples cinema displays and imacs are non-rotatable, netbooks where a portrait ratio would work wonders often do not have a simple command key to rotate your windows view. In the latest release of apples macbook pro, apple has chosen to retain the taller 16:10 aspect ratio rather than follow suit with the pc world as they have done with their imacs.
With rising adoption of hdtvs, and games consoles with web-browsers, and htpcs, our home theatre displays are increasingly being used to browse the web although this is still a while off. However, desktop pcs now come with increasing large monitors in excess or 21 inches, if there is something they have in common with our home theatre screens, hdtvs have a standardized resolution of 1920 x 1080, and many of our monitors have a similar resolution, 1920 is a frustrating number regarding screen width. 1920 is less than double 1024 the web width standard, and therefore not wide enough to display two web pages simultaneouly side by side, but requires major scaling for most sites to not have huge expanses or red or whatever background the site has.
There is no simple solution to this problem, whereas in past there were only a few standardized screen resolutions, most monitors were of a taller aspect ratio and pixel density was similar in most monitors, the ever widening ways in which we use our pcs, browse the web and find new mediums to use the web with such as smart-phones and tablets will present a major challenge.
