Web Design, Minimal Window Width

History of Desktop Display (monitor) Size

• Around 1998, web design assumes 640×480.
• Around 2005, web design assumes 800×600.
• Around 2012, web design assumes 1024×800.

Web Design Minimal Window Width, as of 2012

Google Plus in past month (2012-03-08) started to assume your window size must be 1014 pixels. If your window size is narrow than that, part of the content won't show, you'll need to horizontal scroll.

Here is some minimal sizes for each site.

• Facebook = 1014
• apple.com = 1014
• google.com = 1014
• microsoft.com = 1000
• Yahoo! = 1014
• amazon = 1033
• Twitter = 900 (mininum); (990 to show all items in nav bar)
• Gmail = 994 (mininum); 1290 (no horizontal scroll bar)
• Google Plus = 994 (mininum). 1080 for nav bar to float.
• Google Reader = 952
• DISQUS = 1180

The above are tested with web browsers on a PC, running Windows 7.

Here is sites that used a flow approach.

• Wikipedia = flow
• hootsuite = flow