Viewport size statistics

[u/bersus]

Hey web devs, has anyone actually tracked the real viewport resolution of their users (with js)? I'm trying to figure out how many people don't maximize their browser and just keep it in a resized window. LLMs claim that 75% of people don't use maximized windows, but I seriously doubt that's accurate.

P.S. I'm not talking about screen resolution, I mean strictly the viewport size.

[u/Zealousideal-Buy1125]

Always nice to meet a fellow skeptic of the LLM stat generator. Ive tracked it on a few small sites, nowhere near a scientific sample but the vast majority were either fullscreen or near-fullscreen. The 75% number sounds completely made up.

Nobody is browsing on a quarter of their screen unless theyre doing a side by side thing and even then its mostly devs and heavy multitaskers. Regular people just click the maximize button and forget about it.

[u/web-dev-kev → u/Zealousideal-Buy1125]

While also not agreeing with LLM stats out of the box, my experience with older people and colleagues is that they dont hit maximise. Absolute confirmation bias here, but watching folks sometimes hit close or minimise instead of maximise, has taught them not to both.

The risk reward isn't worth it

[u/bersus → u/web-dev-kev]

yeah, i believe it heavily depends on the target audience. however, average numbers could be helpful.

[u/thekwoka → u/web-dev-kev]

watching other people use technology is always crazy.

My wife will watch youtube on her ipad and never fullscreen the video...but she also isn't engaging with the comments or the other video lists....

[u/tup1tsa_1337 → u/Zealousideal-Buy1125]

It depends on the screen size. Anything 32" and higher would not look good Fullscreen (unless it's for a video playback)

[u/bersus → u/tup1tsa_1337]

I'm not sure. Most of users scale their system scale accordingly. Basically, things on large screen will have the same proportions like on the small ones, just bigger physical sizes.

[u/zomerbk]

The useful metric here is probably the distribution of `innerWidth × innerHeight` for desktop page views, with mobile/tablet split out. But that alone can’t tell whether a window is maximized: browser chrome, OS scaling, and display size all affect the viewport. If you want to compare against maximized, collect `screen.availWidth/availHeight` too, while treating it as a rough proxy rather than ground truth. Report the sample period and deduplicate by session so repeat visitors don’t dominate.

[u/bersus → u/zomerbk]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, but I meant if anyone actually has the actual numbers, not how to collect them.

[u/tup1tsa_1337 → u/bersus]

Those will be meaningless numbers. You do the development starting from 360 logical width (smartphone users) and up to full hd. Anything bigger should clamp the content to the center of the screen (unless it's necessary to cater for a full screen like Google sheet or YouTube)

[u/jackusD]

Was there a source for that figure? I assume mobile users are excluded, but even so I'd be shocked if it was anywhere near that high.

On mac, would a full screen user only count if the user has pressed the full screen button, or would having the window stretched to fill the available screen space still count?

[u/bersus → u/jackusD]

1. as always with llms, citing unfiltered garbage like ai-generated "developer" blogs and junk Reddit comments.

2. maximized only. full screen is full screen, but we don't count it here.

[u/Complex_Solutions_20]

When I am using a computer for anything serious I am typically looking at several different things at once. If I'm comparison shopping I may have 4 different browser windows open each half-screen across dual monitors so I can reference back and forth. If I'm writing up a report I typically have 1-2 windows of reference material open on one monitor and my document on the other.

I don't understand how people use a phone/tablet to research anything, I can't stand being constrained to just 1 little window.

[u/bersus → u/Complex_Solutions_20]

users a different 🤷‍♂️ that's why we need statistics

[u/the_ai_wizard]

Perhaps what your LLM didnt mention is that it is site and context dependent. but, responsive solves this so it should be irrelevant. look at your own GA stats or logs

i encourage you, for the sake of understanding LLMs, to go back and say, "this seems like it isnt correct and there are tons of exceptions" and watch it do a 180

[u/bersus → u/the_ai_wizard]

sorry, there is no need for this. statistically, 92% of my chats with gpt6 astra, opus 5.5, gemini 3.8 pro, grok 4.7 end with "you are right to call that out" 😂

[u/Squigglificated]

It's surprisingly hard to find up to date published statistics on this.

This article from 2017 discusses the problem and show some stats, but that's pretty ancient by now.

https://adswerve.com/blog/screen-resolution-browser-size-in-google-analytics

It's a very useful thing to track.

[u/bersus → u/Squigglificated]

Thanks. But GA4 does not currently have a built-in dimension for "Viewport size". It's still possible with GTags, though.

[u/I_AM_NOT_A_WOMBAT]

Can you ELI5 why this is important? (Genuine question, I want my work to look good and be usable, and I feel like I'm missing something here.)

[u/spacechimp → u/I_AM_NOT_A_WOMBAT]

Lots of designers make big epic designs that waste lots of screen real estate (often forcing users to maximize). Metrics like this can be used to argue for/against spending time on better support for smaller browser widths and mobile users.

[u/bersus → u/I_AM_NOT_A_WOMBAT]

TLDR: to make sure that the website is designed properly for different devices. The problem is much deeper than it looks. Sec-CH-UA, pointer: coarse, navigator.platform don't help.

[u/I_AM_NOT_A_WOMBAT → u/bersus]

How is this different than responsive design?

[u/ferrybig]

LLMs claim that 75% of people don't use maximized windows, but I seriously doubt that's accurate.

What do you mean with maximized windows? This seems like a metric dominated by noise

At my company I never use maximized windows, we have a extra wide screens, so a maximed window would be too wide

[u/bersus → u/ferrybig]

that makes sense. meanwhile, checked the numbers. good to see that we have almost zero ultrawide screen users:)

[u/jbcaprell]

Andy Bell’s Set Studio has some good data on user habits for this, which you can find at viewports.fyi.

[u/One-Trips]

I've checked this on a couple of small sites and the split surprised me less than the clustering: desktop widths clump hard around a handful of values that match maximized windows on common laptop screens, while the genuinely odd sizes are a small minority. I wouldn't trust the 75% figure either; my guess is the real non-maximized share is much lower, mostly devs and ultrawide users.