Where's the fold?

This is gonna be a more tech-specific post (sorry, no pictures). Everyone in web design knows about that little bugger called the "fold." Simply defined: the point at which you need to scroll your browser to see more content on a web page. It's a horizon of sorts, in the vertical dimension of your website. So, where's it hanging out these days? Our designer extraordinaire, Samantha Oliver, pointed me to this great article which places the fold between the 570px-610px range (on a 1024x768 monitor). The author of the post, John Ellis, asks if designing to the fold is even relevant anymore—if it's given more weight in web design than it deserves. It's a good read, no matter which side of the fence you happen to be on.

I also thought I'd check in on the latest browser and screen specs of web-users from w3schools.com:

Screen
As of January 2009, 36% of users are at 1024x768. 57% are at higher resolutions. Last year 1024x768 was at 48%, so i suspect the number will be in the low 20s in 2010—hopefully being phased out a few years from now.

Browser
Firefox currently has the lead at 47.7% as of May 2009, with IE7 at a distant 21.3%. IE6 is stilling hanging in there at 14.5% (oh, how we can't wait to see you go, for .png adoption alone).

I suspect the fold will be around as long as we have a minimum screen resolution to design to. The thing is, solid standards like 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 don't really exist anymore. A quick survey of my Sitemeter stats shows 16 different screen resolutions, ranging from 320x396 to 2048x1152!

For now, you can pretty safely say the fold exists at around 600px. I guess time will tell.