Enabling them to check how many users get to see a portion of a web page

Dec 17, 2009 08:42 GMT  ·  By
Google Browser Size enables web developers to see how many users get to see a portion of a web page
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   Google Browser Size enables web developers to see how many users get to see a portion of a web page

Google has its hands in a huge number of projects with wildly varied scopes and means yet they all center on one thing, the web. Weather it's releasing a new DNS service or thinking how will people access web apps in five years time with Chrome OS it's easy to forget one simple thing, for most people the web means what they can see in their browsers, everything else doesn't really matter. Unsurprisingly, Google has people handling the more practical issues as well, and one of them has released a tool used internally to determine how many visitors actually see a portion of a web page.

“To help you understand how everyone sees your website, we created a tool called Browser Size in our 20% time. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users,” Bruno Bowden, senior software engineer at Google wrote.

“For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it.”

Brower Size is a simple Labs project which can give web designers a lot of insight into what most people are going to see straight away on their websites. It's easy to assume that people will view your website at a reasonable resolution, the one you designed for maybe, and most web designers go for a 1024 by 786 or 800 by 600 screen resolution as the lowest common denominator when creating a site.

But even these, rather small sizes, aren't guaranteed as many users may not have the browser window maximized or screen real estate may be taken up by toolbars and other items. To further complicate things, mobile Internet usage is on the rise and these devices come in a myriad of screen sizes and resolutions.

With Browser Size though, you can get a statistically accurate measurement of just what percentage of the users get to see a portion of the page. It's based on sample data from google.com visitors, so it may not be entirely representative of your site, but you're not going to get a better source than the Google homepage. Using it is trivial, go to the Labs page dedicated to it, enter the URL and that's it, you now know what most users get to see and what they don't. If you want to know the nitty gritty of how Google created the tool, you can check out the post on the Google Code Blog.

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Google Browser Size enables web developers to see how many users get to see a portion of a web page
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