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We have been tracking the screen resolutions of visitors to dzone.com, and virtually none of them are using 800x600. Even 1024x768 only accounts for about 25%. I guess that means developers are working on some pretty well-equipped machines compared to the average user.

I'd be hard-pressed to argue in favor of supporting 800x600 as the baseline these days. We'd like our sites to degrade reasonably on 800x600, but there just doesn't seem to be much reason to compromise the real, available resolutions in order to accomodate users with seriously outmoded screens.

I think part of the problem is that one confuses screen resolution and browser frame dimensions.
My screen's resolution is 1024x768, however, I never use my browser fullscreen (even though I use a multitab-capable browser, I like to have some margin around it. I don't know whether I am an isolate case, but 800x600 suits me perfectly. I'd hate to have to put my browser window fullscreen to read a website!
What do you think?

Please don't forget about people who set their resolutions down to compensate for poor eyesight. (Case in point: I used to be comfortable with a 21" CRT at 2560x1280, but over 1600x1200 now is hard to deal with.) Plus, the concerns of hf48922 - I rarely, if ever, browse fullscreen.

Shouldn't we be designing in a way that doesn't limit the viewer to a specific chunk of real estate anyway? Why force the user to devote a bunch of screen space to your website?

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