A post from Bonsai about his resolution stats for his site, which are 37% for 1024x768 and 27% for 1280x1024 (800x600 came in at a measly #5 with 4%) made me think about recent convos about browser resolution and is it time to up the lowest common standard to 1024x768.
Looking at his stats you could argue that it is time to make the change. But these are all computer and technical people hitting technical blogs. I don't necessarily think it is a fair sampling. My stats don't track resolution, so I have nothing firm to argue with, but I would love to see resolution stats for popular sites like MSN, Google and Yahoo.
Another factor is the target end audience. Are corporate users more likely to have higher resolutions than general home users? The computers tend to be bigger and more powerful and have larger screens, will that drive up the resolution? So do you design by lowest common denominator, or by target end users?
Nevertheless, the change to 1024x768 will be a slow and cumbersome one, just like the upgrade to 800x600. The ironic thing to me is the additional movement to make every thing mobile screen friendly. So we have to design with both big (and getting bigger) and little screens in mind.