Current practice
Based on these statistics, the only definitive conclusion is that it is finally time not to worry about how your page will appear in 640 × 480 monitors (unless, of course, you know the target audience for your site is likely to have outdated hardware setups).
As of this writing, professional web developers tend to design pages that fit in 800 × 600 monitors. Although the percentage of people with this monitor resolution is steadily shrinking, with just a fifth of all traffic, it is still too large a population to risk alienating. For this reason, you will find that most fixed-width consumer- or business-oriented web sites are designed to be approximately 750 pixels wide.
If you know that the majority of your visitors will have a higher monitor resolution (such as graphic designers), or if the right edge of your design does not contain critical content, then it may be safe to design to fill the live space of a 1024 × 768 monitor. Very few sites today are designed to fill 1280 × 1024.
I suspect as 800 × 600 monitors go the way of 640 × 480, we’ll be seeing larger and larger web pages. For now, however, consider 800 × 600 the lowest common denominator monitor resolution.
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