Oh, size issues again… Size Matters – said yours truly back in April, before returning the very first eee PC after only a day:
I could get used to the screen size, my fingers would learn to deal with the keyboard, but it’s impossible to browse the Net with this thing. The problem is that most websites are designed for larger resolution, and the eee can only display part of a page. Vertical scrolling (a lot) is not the end of the world, but having to scroll horizontally, just to find disappearing action buttons is simply ridiculous.
Asus may have created the netbook mania, but others certainly picked up, and not a day goes by without significant netbook announcements: it’s the single fastest growing (albeit low margin) segment of the PC market. It’s Not Only About Size – I wrote recently, pointing out, the real question was not whether the screen is 8.9” or 10” (7'’s are dinosaurs by now), but how we use these cheap little thingies:
A Netbook is a light mobile computing device that allows you to process information, access the Internet, and that does not store a bundle of bloated programs or data.
It’s really all about device-independent computing on the Web, or, as As Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood says: The Web Browser is the New Laptop.
Today, we’re revisiting the size issue once again. It’s not about how large the display / keyboard is, but what you can do with them on the Net. Most websites today are designed at a resolution of 1024×768, and guess what: there’s not one single (good) netbook on the market today that that can display that. All of the current crop, including the deluxe Asus S101 max out at 600 vertical resolution. The only exception was the first version of the HP Mini, at a generous 1280x768 on a small screen, but while HP should be commanded for lowering the price on the second generation, they blew it by downgrading the screen to 1024x600. Dell’s new Mini 12 comes with 1200x800 resolution, but they blew it, too, by pairing the sleek machine with Vista: before it even hit the market the judgement was out: sleek, but slow.
So that leaves us with no decent notebook as of now. Yes, I enjoyed the small size and light weight of the cute Acer Aspire One I took to a conference, but the 600 resolution proved to be more of a hindrance than I had expected. It’s not fun when your browser toolbars occupy half your screen real estate (keep on hitting F11), but browsing, reading is not the worst part: just try using any input form or edit window where the action buttons are missing - some at the top, others at the bottom, you keep on scrolling forever.
So I am still waiting for the first really usable netbooks to arrive. But I disagree with Tom Doyle, who recommends web designers switch back stick to 800 pixel width: you can’t turn time back. Progress means higher resolution, better screens, and the market has already moved on anyway. Rather then downgrading websites, let’ trust manufacturers will soon wake up and start shipping netbooks that are actually net-compliant.
Update: The worst thing about the screens is vertical resolution, which is generally 600 pixels - says TechCrunch.
Update: The title says it all @ CrunchGear: Netbook makers should stop adding fluff and focus on screen resolution
I know it may not be your cup of tea, but try using Opera. The browser has a "Fit to screen" mode that works EXTREMELY well. They had to do a lot of that to make Opera work on cell phones and the Wii, so it should work fine for your netbooks as well. I don't use Firefox, but it should have something similar. Both browsers are on both Windows and your favorite Linux flavors, so give it a shot.
I have an eeePC 900 and I am using a combination of Firefox plugins to maximise the screen. I use TinyMenu, Locationbar2, and an alt key one that hides the locationbar until I press the alt key. The result is fullscreen without actually going fullscreen. And it works, it really does :)
My heart is in my throat with this one. Some sites like twitter can adjust, but where the web has become heavily visual, 800x600 might send us back to the text age. Would that be such a bad thing?
Firstly, I never suggest "switch" back, for me the time to move on to larger resolutions has not arrived yet. 12-20% depending on the statistics you read, is a huge chuck of potential visitors to your site that could have huge difficulty viewing your website. We wouldn't be going back in time, because people are still using this resolution today. It's not hard to design a site to look good in all of the most used resoultions. So it's certainly not "downgrading" as you put it, it's all about good design and trying to include as many people as possible. Leaving technology aside, what would you prefer, everyone that you hope to do business with see your site exactly as you want them to, or just the majority of them? For me it's a no-brainer...
Tom, First of all, thanks for coming over and responding here. I don't have a lot of statistics, but I wonder if 10-20% is realistic. I looked up the CloudAve visitor stats, and 0.63% have 800x600 resolution. There's another interesting number: 320x396, (is that the iPhone?) which 0.89% of visitors have. My personal blog (which has more traffic, although I suspect not for long) shows 1.55% at 800x600 and 0.3% at 320x396. All that said, I recognize we probably have more tech-savvy, gizmo-loving readers here, so the stats are likely skewed. But the reality is that we're probably talking about 6-8+ year old screens here with the 800x600 max resolution, so we both know they are coming to their end-of-life soon. But I did not mean to sound ignorant, and the focus of my post was not about web-design: I wanted to speak up against manufacturers releasing new products (Netbooks) at what is clearly sub-standard resolution TODAY.
Hi Zoli, Yes it is realistic, again depending on your target market. A look across our clients sites shows ranges of 0.1% to 28% for people using 800x600 resolution. I do believe the day is coming that we won't have to worry about 800x600 on PCs, but catering for smaller resolutions is a definite possibility. I don't disagree with your post, I do believe we should move forward and device manufacturers should definitely move ahead too. However, your comment about me is taken out of context and not true to fact. As I stated, I never said designers should "switch back" as you put it. My post asks the question, should we move ahead when designing websites and risk cutting out what I would feel is a high percentage of users, when with good design, you can include all these users and give the same user experience. As stated in my post, most of our clients now request the larger resolution, but for me, it's all the wrong reasons.
Tom, gotcha, changed that "switch back". :-)
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