It would be more accurate to design off of the Window Width, not the screen resolution.

It’s a poor assumption to assume that everybody will automatically adjust their browser to the full-screen width. Most users do not browse at full screen.

about browers,i think it is not quite accurate,maybe it is based on your site.Much more common people dont use firefox as their default brower,they may use IE generally。

While I appreciate your attempt to capture statistics and share them, these numbers are insanely skewed. When was the last time a near-sighted 50-something was perusing the archives at SmashingApps? Do we think he/she would have their browser set to 1280 x 1024?
These are the kind of misleading stats that designers latch onto and cite as relevant when designing for ANY audience rather than understanding THEIR audience and their needs.
I think it’s safe to say that while these numbers are informative for a tech/design-heavy site geared towards 20- and 30-something designers and developers, they are by no means indicative of the entire landscape of users.
That said, thanks for publishing anyway : )

This helps designers to find out the trend of their website visitors easily and make his/her website give a best viewing experience by using stats for their website.

Doug, Exactly.

To claim these are valid stats for the entire Internet is ridiculously misleading.

Since when did Firefox have over 50% market share?

I’d also be willing to bet 1024×768 is a much more popular screen resolution.

I’m a Mac user, but 18% of the market? Come on…

You would have completely saved yourself here if you didn’t imply these statistics applied to the entire Internet.

You may have even gotten away with saying these relate to Technology websites–that I may believe.

But the entire Internet? Wrong, just wrong.

Being a website aimed primarily at developers, I assume a big chunk of SmashingApps traffic comes from, e.g., StumbleUpon, where most of the people are using Firefox because of the toolbar, which is not available for IE6.

Obviously, developers have to target their own audience, but numbers like these are always interesting in getting some idea of how your audience compares with the rest of the web.

I work on a website for a school district, and our audience seems to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from yours. In the interest of sharing (rather than ranting), here are some of our GA stats from February 2008: (representing about 350k visits on just our front page)

Screen Resolution:
800×600 – 63.5% (this is the initial setting in the standard disk image)
1024×768 – 24.81%
1280×800 – 4.18%
1280×1024 – 2.97%

Browser:
IE – 97.3%
– IE6 – 86.93% (this is the only browser in the standard disk image)
– IE7 – 13.03%
Firefox – 1.9%
Safari – 0.68%

Flash versions:
9.0 – 96.64%
9.0 r115, r47, r28, r45, r16 – 2.5%~

As hard as I push for us not to incorporate Flash anywhere we don’t have to, the statistics really are against me. Also, we have to push the tech people to make changes to the standard image. (One of them literally told me that at this point, browsers like IE7 and Firefox 2 are pretty much the same.)

For the people claiming ‘insanely skewed statistics’! You have to read to the end of the post!
The point of the post is to use an anlytics program to determine what your readers are using and then tailor your site to your readers.
The post may be guilty of an incomplete opening paragraph, but it doesn’t seem it ever tried to imply that everyone should use these sample statistics.

thanks for the feature..

We right in the middle of our Q2 2009 data collection and from what we are seeing so far many developers are holding their official asking prices quite firm against the Q4 2008 benchmark that we collected. We’re not all the way through the analysis so I don’t want to jump the gun on this point. But we were expecting to see asking price reductions across the board. Of course developers will likely accept offers below asking in the present market where little is moving. We should get initial conclusions from the data out in the next few weeks and look forward to more dialogue on this. When looking at future prospects for Panama City the key will be to maintain its status as a safe haven location for investors (a portfolio play out of US stocks for example). The second/vacation home market (or lifestyle market) alone, combined with the oversupply factor, will be too weak to sustain current prices.

Would love to have more on-the ground perspective on this. So welcome additional thoughts.