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 … (read more)