The Web is shrinking.

From 2007 to 2008, the top resolution of visitors to Rosetta Code was 1280x1024 at 27% of visits. Then, in the 2008 to 2009 range, 1280x1024, while stop the top resolution, reduced in share to 23% of visitors.

Meanwhile, 1280x800, in third for both years, rose from 11% in the 2007-2008 range to 17% in the 2008-2009 range.

(For the curious, 2nd place is held for both time periods by 1024x768, which fell from 24% of visits to 19% of visits.)

So while the width of the average viewer's browser window is staying roughly the same, the height of the browser window is shrinking.

What this means for web developers, in a practical sense, is that they have to shrink any header bar they have on their website in order to increase content exposure to viewers in that crucial first few seconds; The more uninteresting branding crap a viewer sees, the less likely he is to stick around.

Another possible approach to deal with the shrinking vertical screen space is to use Javascript to immediately center the top of the browser window on the first content div. Conveniently, if any given div has an id in Firefox, you can tread that ID the way you might have treated a named anchor in ancient versions of HTML. So if you give your content div and id of "content", having Javascript send your user to (PAGE)#content will level the top of your content with the top of their browser's viewable area--cut the fat, give them the meat. (Direct links work, too, but search engines aren't likely to point a user to a named div.)

The one tricky part is to make sure that you don't replace any anchor they might already have been intending to navigate to.