It used to be that any web site you tried to build, you had to make sure that the content would fit snugly into a browser window on an OS running at 640px wide. Now, this isn’t as much of a problem – only a small minority of users use this resolution any more. Even the next step up at 800×600 is becoming less common as basic PCs are now able to easily cope with larger resolutions. So, you’d think that designing a site to fit into a width of 720px would be fine and dandy?

Perhaps not.

On my PC at work, I use Firefox as my default browser (as all of us web developers really should do) and have my monitor at 1280×1024. This is the maximum that my monitor allows but it serves the purpose. So, in theory, I should have a large area of screen available for viewing the web. But… Firefox has a really handy sidebar on the left that can be used (and is by myself) to view bookmarks, web history etc. As I usually have this open, there’s a chunk of screen space away already.

Also, Google has just come out with the beta of its new sidebar. This has the handy feature of keeping an eye on your RSS feeds and local news, weather etc that you might find interesting. I’ve also got that installed as it actually reduces the amount of time I spend looking around at the BBC News website and my other favourites. But, this is taking away a chunk of the screen on the right now as well.

So, with both running, I have an effective browser window with of just under 800px. A 720px wide web page still looks fine in this smaller window (thankfully, as this is what I’m building at the moment) but, again, I’m running at a higher resolution than a lot of people might. If I switch the resolution down to 1024×768, then we have the horror of horizontal scrollbars. Which, I think you’ll agree, is a bad thing.

Should we start designing sites to run in this smaller window? I read a while ago that the upcoming new version of Windows is going to have a sidebar as part of the OS – is this going to cut down on the browser size? You can argue that people can switch these sidebars off if they cause problems with their viewing, but these new tools are going to become more useful as time goes on and users are not going to want to have to switch them off every time they come to a page that doesn’t fit in their browser – they’ll just carry on to a page that does fit.

Maybe now’s a time to start slimming down.