Google recently published a new tool to help web designers and developers assess the real estate on their pages. It's a basic tool which overlays a standard graph over your pages showing you the percentage of visitors who have their browsers open to the specific size. Check it out at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/.

I played around with it a bit and found it a little too elementary. Any good web designer knows that you have to stay above the fold and shouldn't exceed certain widths. If you web page is centered, the tool doesn't take that into account so it'll show that your page won't be seen by 20% of your visitors, for example, using our site on my screen at 1920x1080, their tools shows this:

Only 80% of my visitors will see half of the page. Apparantely that's not accurate. If I resize my browser to 1024x768, it's more accurate.

Now it shows that only 5% of the visitors may not see the full width. According to Google, "Browser Size works best on web pages with a fixed layout aligned to the left. If the content reflows as the width is adjusted or it is centered, then the results can be misleading. In this case, you can obtain more accurate results by reducing the browser width to a percentage column, e.g. 90% and seeing what content falls below the 90% horizontal line."

One more thing that is nice, you can specify an internal web address as well. For instance, if you are developing a site and want to check out the browser size, simply type in the internal URL and blamo you're comparing it to your internal address. It appears the window displaying the website is client based not server based.

I watch this tool with anticipation, it has potential of being a great tool. Integrating it with their Google Analytics would be REAL nice too.