After Christmas this year, I removed the tree from our living room, and in the process of being moved, it shed of needles everywhere. I swept them up, but I missed a few areas on my first pass. So I did a second pass, but when I looked again, I saw there were still a handful left. It struck me how removing >99% of the needles was nowhere near acceptable! Lots of cleaning jobs are like this, I suppose, because even a tiny mess can be visually distinct. In fact, as you approach 100%, the remaining mess stands out more.
If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen.
As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update their browser once a year or better.
The tradeoff is code complexity and engineering time, vs having a larger market. And that's going to be an individual situation for every company.
Former chef here (2 Michelin starred restaurants).
5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome!
> works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people
If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my food either. I don't need to make 8 billion people happy for my restaurant to survive. I only need to make ~1000 people happy who keep returning for anniversaries, birthdays, and the pure enjoyment of creativity with food.
I was a yacht chef for years and only needed to make 10 people happy. The technique I used was everyone eats the same thing, crew and guests. Saving money doing my own shopping instead of relying on provisioning companies that would send me food not handled correctly, my monthly expense went from ~$30k to ~$10k when guests are on board a month -- food in St. Barts was flown in from France everyday and expensive, circa 2005, so I could afford to serve the chateaubriand, osso bucco, and everything else to the crew. Therefore, what I wanted to eat everyday which likely was balanced, had lots of fiber, and healthier choices was the thing that everyone ate everyday.
People ask if the guests and owners would tell me what they want to eat everyday. The Mister was CEO of a fortune 500 company and when retired still chairman of the board. This guy was making billion dollar decisions everyday and the Mrs. was very busy also. The last thing they want to do is answer what is for dinner every night. They delegated the decision making to me. I always cooked what I wanted to eat and was always correct.
It is impossible to make everyone happy. Don't try -- it will break you.
Yeah, when I read the article I thought "Great, more paternalistic advice that pretends we have infinite resources/time/money."
Anyone who has ever done website or mobile development knows there is a huge array of browsers and platforms, and supporting the very long tail of configurations is sometimes nearly impossible, let alone almost never cost effective. When I last ran some web apps, we'd see substantial numbers of errors just due to f'd up (or sometimes outright malicious) browser plugins. I'm not checking every random configuration of browser plugins against my website to ensure they all work.
Like you say, it really depends, which is why I hate blanket directives like the article gave. If suddenly 2% of people couldn't log into gmail, that would be a huge deal affecting 10s of millions of people. As the adage goes, "You're not Google", and for a lot of small e-commerce websites trying to fix someone on some decade+ old browser just doesn't make sense (and, as another comment mentioned, these users are often the least likely to convert in any case).
He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.
Except there was 0 analysis of the cost/benefit of supporting the end of the long tail, instead it was just economics-free shaming. Of course, you want to see who those 2% of users actually are. But nowhere in this article did I find any advice I'd actually want to use in a really business scenario.
Respectfully: To me these just sound like excuses.
I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you deliberately choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? All these choices deliberately made during development add up to the product you deliver at the end of the day.
When a developer says "it's too expensive to develop this for a dozen configurations" that just means they have already chosen to make their applications inaccessible, and are justifying it after the fact.
This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.
Yeah but as long as they’re not public services, the business can just decide to not serve these clients. There’s no recourse possible for these clients.
For public services you can tell people to use another device, or provide a way to schedule an appointment in-person that is accessible using old browsers.
Seems like you’re getting hate but this is how the world works. Uber just has to support the devices that their market uses. And especially for visas the government is free to make the public bend to whatever arbitrary requirements they develop for using their byzantine systems.
You you can make a law that requires such businesses to use perfectly good technology standards that are widely supported instead of whatever EEE crap the latest Chrome comes with.
I remember years ago when websites would have buttons "best viewed in Internet explorer 4.0". We're past those days, but only because it's implied "use chrome, maybe webkit, we didn't test on Firefox"
I agree, but one thing is to demand all your users to be on the latest Chrome, and another one is to support browsers that are no longer maintained and contain security issues (IE). If we discourage people from driving old insecure cars, we can also discourage people from using old insecure browsers.
It’s very difficult for the average person to use a ten year old browser; in fact I’d offer that the only way to use a ten year old browser is to be an expert and do so intentionally.
There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers.
There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason.
These people just use the sites that work. They aren't computer experts, and might not even realise why half the internet doesn't work - they just think that's the way things are.
While I agree with your general gist and definitely your final paragraph,
> There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers.
How many people have 10 year old phones? I've got an 8 year old iPhone XR which I keep around as a backup/travel device because it's not worth selling, and the battery is… not happy even in airplane mode.
For me to have a 10 year old mobile browser, I'd have to have kept the iPhone SE 1 (or was it a 5c?) that I bought second hand in 2018, and not upgraded it since I bought it. I got rid of it because the battery wouldn't hold a charge for 10 minutes.
It's fine to support such configurations by accident, but you shouldn't try to support them intentionally. You will end up dropping support eventually regardless but the skeletons will live on in your codebase as tech debt.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
I'm not sure this is a realistic use case to try and support. A 10 year old android phone likely has a battery life measured in 10s of minutes, and really isn't something we need to worry about.
That's a choice by the people who make websites and browsers that forces the average person to buy a new computer. If we all cared about letting people use old computers, this wouldn't be the case.
There’s also being poor, or working for an organization that’s poor. In both cases the obsolete(?) software might be various degrees of intentional, but the alternative is usually worse anyway.
I doubt that for the hackernews audience that the age of the browsers is an issue. I would say in practice that 90% is nowhere near what is achieved - that it's closer to 90% and amongst the hackernews audience probably lucky if it gets to 50% because of our use of anti-tracking and ad blockers.
I use a browser that had its last release less than a year ago.
It doesn't do CSS, it doesn't do javascript and I love it.
I also love to be able to use the websites I need.
Sometimes you want to give certain people an incentive to not be your customers because your company would be entirely better off if they were someone else’s customer.
This is why discounts are often a bad way to get customers, you don't want the customers who (only) go for discounts, they're often worse (and not just their sensitivity to prices).
It's also super easy to apply it wrong because going above X% in one area normally means sinking below X% in another. I think a clearer way to say it is that sometimes, you have to be almost perfect, and 98% could sound like almost perfect but it's way too low. But definitely the things you don't need to be perfect far outnumber the ones you do.
If your business plan is selling software to people, 98% is not plenty at all.
If your web app crashes one out of every fifty times I launch it, it's not good. The business side of things is reasonable to prioritize right up until it isn't.
> If your web app crashes one out of every fifty times I launch it,
If you're using a different, random browser every time you access our web app, you're in a minority far smaller than 2%. Or you've shared your account with 50 friends, and we'd prefer that you do that with someone else's app anyway.
Yes, the article discusses how 98% is good in context and bad in others. You just... restated the article but reversed the premise, resulting in an overly optimistic yet anti-social framing.
That framing is setting the question so you immediately are forced to compare pears to apples.
Of course 98% of sterilization is not enough for surgery or for precision in calculating your account balance but the category of landing page conversion a 98% would be astronomically high.
While I agree with the general sentiment, the problem here isn't developers not being familiar with statistics, it's the simple fact all of this is profit driven most of the time.
I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver a code to my number. I tried a few numbers from our household and they all failed.
Searching for this issue yielded a bunch of results, so it was definitely a known issue, but there wasn't anything I could do, really. To them, it's simple math. Another SMS provider that covers my (tiny EU) country might be more expensive. They might be avoiding scammers that used my mobile operator in the past. Whatever it is, it would probably cost them more than they lose in ticket sales.
Without some government entity to force them, they don't give a shit about me being able to see an event.
Infrastructure should not be (purely) profit driven. To improve profits for train operators, the simple option is to cut lines serving small and rural communities. The economics are much worse than serving large cities. Same for cell coverage and broadband internet. Most profitable is to just not cover a few percent of the population.
There is a point where technology becomes foundational for participating in society. And then it needs to be regulated to be available to everyone.
Meanwhile in Britain in the 1960s, this cost-cutting closure of local rail lines did happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts ... at a time when the trains and rail infrastructure had been publicly owned for about 15 years already. It doesn't dispel the incentive.
I have never heard the name Beeching spoken with more venom than in Wales, I used to live in Mid Wales and now I live in Cardiff. If I wanted to visit where I used to live by train, I'd have to do a multi-hour detour of a sightseeing trip around the West Midlands, deep into England. The Beeching Axe literally cut Wales in half and the consequences are felt to this day, even though there wasn't much outright salting the Earth to make sure the terrible decision couldn't be reversed as there was in some cases, the Welsh government doesn't have the money to reinstate the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen line which would deal with a lot of these north-south issues.
Also it's not just Wales where Beeching carried out intense vandalism of public infrastructure, the South West was severely affected too. Basically anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power. The general assumption was that private cars would replace the local trains, which as someone who currently doesn't drive for medical reasons really makes my blood boil. While perhaps not in intent, in effect the Beeching Axe was a profound kick in the teeth for the disabled.
I’m not arguing a rail has never been closed. I’m arguing that being a small difficult market doesn’t exclude you from being served by marketed forces.
Did nobody ever operate rail to those cities again due to them being rural?
Rural cities? Come again? What was demolished remained demolished, yes. Unclear on your point.
Oh I see (thanks to that edit). I mean, I agree with you. This is just the additional amusing detail that government-run services are still subject to a sort of dulled and homogenous version of market forces, which can be worse for small local concerns because it's less responsive. Though, admittedly, a giant corporation can simulate government very well, and can be just as crap.
> A few of these routes have since reopened. Some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes
> Some, such as the bulk of the Midland Metro network around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, have since been incorporated into light rail lines.
Furthermore, the transformation to other transportation forms suggests this event also coincides with changing technology.
You cut off the OP's sentence of that being examples for "Rail companies" and then added your own examples. Please be better at comprehesion and editing comments
"In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US." You know they use the Postal Service for last miles often? And the Postal Service is required by law to service far-flung places. So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
Yea, when this topic comes up on HN, a lot of the usual excuses appear: It's hard to write software that works everywhere! It takes too long to test on more than one browser! It's too expensive to hire someone to port to X platform! We're trying to bootstrap in a hurry--there's no time to support Y people! Everybody should just upgrade to the latest, why should we test on older systems?
These are attitudes come from the privilege of never having been in that 2% of users, and I think we have them until that one day we end up being in that 2% and can't use the system ourselves.
When I wrote iOS apps, I was constantly infuriated by the tech lead's and product management's insistence to only support the current major OS version and the previous one. Engineers would take time out of their day to rip out support for iOS X-2 (rather than fixing bugs, working on performance or features)! Code that wasn't in the way of refactors, wasn't really buggy, wasn't harming anything architecturally. To me, it just looked like Griefing The User. I didn't get it and I still don't. Now, I have a 8 year old phone, and lo and behold, half of the apps in the AppStore don't even work on it anymore because of this attitude, so I guess I'm firmly in the 2%.
I think when you say “profit motivated” the underlying principle is actually utilitarianism; doing the most good for the most people, for which profit Is merely an imperfect proxy.
This might be a cynical take, but I doubt Ticketmaster (and most of these other examples) are motivated by doing the most good. Their underlying principle is extracting the most value for shareholders at any cost.
Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.
There is a limited amount of engineering resources. Don’t you agree they should try to use them for the benefit of the most people? That’s not to say they should exclude groups. But a small minority path probably gets less work than a main path. Would you agree these prudent or not?
The broader point is that percentages can be misleading, and are often because of that. It makes things sound better. But usually, the more accurate thing to do is use odds-notation ("1 in 50" instead of 98%). Percentages have a kind of singularity at the edges, where small numerical changes have massive real effects. Going from a success rate of 98% to 99% doesn't sound like much, but that's failing 1 in 50 vs 1 in 100. You've doubled the efficacy.
In many cases odds are indeed better than probabilities, namely when a small difference at the probability edges indicate a large real difference.
But sometimes small differences at the edges are indeed small, particularly for expected values. Say you win 100 dollars with 98% probability vs with 99.9% probability.
The expected value (probability * dollars) of the latter is only slightly higher than the former ($99.9-$98=$1.90) even though the difference in odds is very large: (0.999/0.001)/(0.98/0.02)≈20.39. So the 99.9% probability is odds 999 to 1, 98% probability is 49 to 1, so the former has more than 20 times higher odds, but the expected amount of money you win is almost the same.
I think there are broadly two types of problems - ones where you get partial credit, and ones where you don't. The restaurant example is one where you don't get partial credit - 98% of food being safe isn't enough, it's all or nothing. Paying your employees - all or nothing, you miss a paycheck once, it's a huge problem.
CSS on a website, however, you CAN get partial credit (to an extent). It may not be perfect, but it's at least theoretically still providing some value partially.
I think knowing what kind of problem you're facing is really important when it comes to measuring percentage of "complete".
Reminds me of the Meat Loaf song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” which was released in Japan as 66%の誘惑 “66% is Good Enough” etc https://www.discogs.com/release/8303076
There are many ways to translate it "66% Seduction", "66%'ll do" etc. But debating the translation misses 66% of the point that it's just a fun fact ;)
One thing I wonder regarding browser market share is always: How is it collected?
I assume Firefox users over proportionally use privacy extensions.Thus they overproportionally won't appear on Google Analytics and similar places, which for some statistics reduces the numbers even more than reality.
Reminds me of statistic where most customers already stop going to a particular supermarket if it stops carrying a handful of the items they want to buy
It may sound like a small deal to not carry one brand of chocolate paste but if some customers then also don't buy the 12 other groceries they need at your shop, it doesn't really matter that it's only 2% of products that were discontinued. Supermarket products are so stable not because nobody ever makes anything new but because changing a small percentage frustrates customers
If I can't order from some website, I stop trying. Maybe next week the ESR browser gets an update and it works again but by then I'm not clicking those links in the search results
If 2 out of 100 people I know see a broken website, depending on the website, that's fine, that doesn't sound like a big deal. Now, if out of 10 power users, all ten of them see a broken site once every 50 logins? Thats a much bigger deal. 98% can be more than enough or not remotely enough depending on the units involved but there are plenty of cases where it's fine to not support the last 2 internet explorer users and stuff
I was heading to dinner with a friend who worked in infra. Google maps said we could bike across town in 20 minutes. He suggested we leave 40 minutes ahead of time and grab a drink at the bar if we got there early. When I raised an eyebrow, he goes:
"What, do you not live your life based on 99th percentiles?"
I tend to think of work as upside-based on downside-based. Most feature work is upside. 10% lift on conversions is great, 40% adoption is winning, and you're playing for the moonshot of 10x. Infra work is downside-based. 98% secure, 98% available, 98% acceptable performance -- that'll all failure. Winning means the thing works as expected and nobody notices.
Not everything sorts cleanly into upside vs. downside, but a lot does. Allocate your risk accordingly.
The other thing to keep in mind is that if you have a policy of considering 98% to be "close enough", then it only takes 35 of those decisions to remove over half the population. And it'll be exceptionally difficult to work your way back up, because each improvement will be minimal!
(Of course, this assumes that each decision is independent, which, when you're talking about browser support for CSS, is certainly not the case.)
The close-to-home example that came to my mind while reading this is GPU programming, where the percentage multiplies. Maybe there are other similar examples where a large sounding percent needs an exponent and shrinks?
With CUDA you try to keep all threads doing the same thing. Sometimes that’s very difficult, but if each thread does the same thing 98% of the time, is that enough? Well since there are warps of 32 connected threads, you might expect the probability that any thread in the warp diverges to be .98^32, or 50% of the time spent with one thread in the diverged code. 50% still doesn’t sound that bad unless threads diverge at different times, and then 50% warp divergence might mean a 16x slowdown overall. 98% isn’t enough in this case.
There's likely always a line somewhere where effort becomes way out of proportion compared to getting that last mile effort.
Arguably, if you only have a website, that won't work for anyone without access to the Internet. So then you should have a physical presence in each of those people's location, and arguably you shouldn't provide any improvements that give me more than physical presence does, so you should not have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office.
If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it.
And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.
Not using bleeding edge web "standards" is also hardly comparable to the office of having a physical presence in every locale though. Software developers seem to be uniquely good ad overvaluing small convenience gains for themselves compared to the pain inflicted by breaking compatibility multiplied by the set of affected users.
Most websites are glorified rich text or forms. And most of the rest should be that. This is even more true for the kinds of websites people need to use rather than some designers art experiments. They don't actually need all these fancy features except to make their developer's work slightly easier.
The biggest thing missing from this analysis is "is there a business case for supporting those 2% of users?". (Maybe, maybe not.)
The second biggest thing is progressive enhancement. The author picked a CSS feature (nesting) that is basically all-or-nothing: the site will basically be entirely broken for those 2% if you swap Sass for native nesting. Most features aren't like that; maybe the site won't look pixel-perfect on old browsers, or one bit of functionality won't work, but by and large it will still be functional. In those cases, I think it's a much easier decision in terms of where to draw the cutoff.
Its hard to find these stats now (need to use Android Studio), but about 10% of android users are on Android v9 and below. Android 9 support was recently discontinued by Chromium, such that they cannot update past Chromium 138.
So, 10% of android users dont have web features beyond, at best, June 2025.
caniuse.com does not track this - they lump all Chrome for android together in the latest version.
This is painful as someone who wants to make use of some very useful, powerful new features, but is targeting people who are most likely to have old, slow, not-updated devices...
That's why things never get better. I mean, i'm all out for retrocompatibility, but if removing something makes my experience much better and unfortunately the thing stops working for 2% of the people with outdated devices/browsers, it's not that sad, but the tradeoffs need to be measured.
I've been in the two ends of this situation, in the 2% with older iPhones and Android devices, and in the 98% with new devices. The 2% cannot hold a tyranny over the absolute majority, and vice versa. Everything must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Wasn't there something in statistics to describe something like this? i.e. gaussian distributions vs something that's modeled on sparse occurrences, etc?
Pragmatically, often users without new browsers and OSses are not the best clients. In ideal world, sure, I want to support everyone. In a world with limited resources, I would better spend my time elsewhere.
There are cases when providing service for remaining 2% isn't profitable. It's better just say "sorry".
I used to work in company where we have spent a lot of time making custom fixes for our software in order to work-around wired hardware/software bugs on machines of individual customers. Yes, we provided service for remaining 2% or so, but in cost of slowing-down overall product development and not making our product better for remaining 98%.
So how about also getting rid of all regulations for wheelchair friendly infrastructure while we are at it? Way too expensive and it is even less than 2% of the population that requires it.
Great idea. We should reevaluate how effective these policies are. The ADA favored visible signs of disability accommodation for political reasons rather than the most essential services. Many historical sites are not available to the public due to this regulation.
I usually go by CanIUse's global percentage when deciding if I can utilize a new browser feature, and right now it's 90.81% (https://caniuse.com/css-nesting)
That's a bit lower than I would be comfortable with, however not that bad, we have been even considering switching all our images to AVIF:
https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF
Global statistics don't matter. What matters is current & potential visitors to your site. And how badly you want them served.
A professional B2B car parts dealer has a very different user profile than say, a local news site in rural Africa.
A site selling concert tickets (for popular artist) probably won't care if site doesn't work for 5% of visitors, the tickets will just take a bit longer to sell out.
But otoh I'm sure there's many businesses out there who wouldn't mind a 2..5% bump in conversion ratio for very little effort.
Personally I don't care. If I'm out to buy something online & webshop doesn't work or takes too long to load, my purchase goes elsewhere.
And ofc government services should be very conservative in this respect.
Edit: and yes, graceful degradation. It's ok if site doesn't look as intended but is still useable for that 2%. And eg. I love that some news site have a text-only lite version.
With images specifically it’s a tradeoff. For image heavy sites like mine, the performance gains provided by webp for the 96% outweigh the potential degradation for the 4%. We get a fair amount of support tickets but not a single ticket has said “I can’t see your images on my X device” since switching to webp (~6months ago)
The author doesn't say you can't use features with 98% (or even less) support.
What they say is that you have to ensure that your site still works for the remaining users, through graceful degradation.
If people have new fancy browsers, use their features to make the interface jazzy. If they don't, ensure that the site still offers its core functionality to them without the fancy features.
It's really easy to serve fallback images to browsers that don't support AVIF, either client-side using the <picture> tag or server-side via the Accept header. Which mostly eliminates the concern from the article, since you don't have to drop support for any customers.
It kind of makes me wonder if anyone has made a build system / framework that serves nested CSS to modern browsers, and falls back to a preprocessed CSS file that removes all the nesting for older browsers.
For anyone who didn't know, caniuse lets you upload your actual usage data. Then for any capability, next to global support you also see the stats for your user-base.
Be careful with new image formats because they also have to be supported by the rest of the user's workflow. The browser might display it, but if it cannot be added to the photos app, or it's not understood by their image editor, or cannot be shared on their preferred chat app, then that's a fail.
That reminds me of an old comic where a guy picks a milk carton from the grocery store shelf and reads in the box: "Now with 0.01% less semen." and he does not know if he's happy or sad about it.
Suppose 98% users have not had any sessions crash. You want to build an addon feature that 10% of your users will buy and which will increase the revenue from those users by 30%.
Do you spend time building the feature, or trying to understand why 2% of users sometimes see crashes?
> If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people.
Yes, because all of us have website serving, checks notes, the entire world...
98% is probably in the neighborhood of 8% more than I'd require for browsers compatibility before deciding to use a new feature. At a certain people need to update and we do ourselves and our other 98% of customers no favors by catering to the lowest common denominator.
See also, the story of YouTube adding a banner pushing people to upgrade off old IE version being a large factor in people upgrading. Now, obviously, we aren't all running YouTube-sized sites but building for ancient browsers is, very often, a large waste of time.
In the age of evergreen browsers you have to go out of your way to be using something that's not at most a couple years out of date.
> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
This reminds me almost precisely of the dynamics of pro sports in the US and how fans are getting priced out of attending games or even watching teams on TV as organizations shift to bespoke streaming platforms.
What about those 30% of audience to update their browser? On our web platform, the team currently displays a message along the lines of: 'Please update your browser; this site relies on features incompatible with your current version'.
And the last 2% is often the hardest part. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, so you're left with these tricky edge cases that may not have a straightforward solution.
> 98% is great for exceptionally good things, like dramatically increasing someone’s quality of life, but very low for basic expectations, like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them.
this is your brain on data science. so absurd that i laughed out loud when i read "like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them" like what is that phrase doing in this sentence and argument
I like to think it depends on what the actual topic is. Even the article's examples reinforce this.
98% market share? Amazing.
98% browser support? There are 15 billion screens in the world. 2% of that is 300 million. Hardly a number we can ignore. Edge cases for those 2% should be considered and implemented
Nice in theory, in practice I remember having to support Internet Explorer about 4 years ago. Hard to justify the investment sometimes, at least polyfills gave use some sanity back. The only reason to do it was: Rich old enterprise customer who can't install chrome due to policies created by Dinosaurs.
Websites are surprisingly hard to maintain long term, specially for a broad audience of devices. Developer Experience can lead to better UX, the easier it is to build/maintain, the more likely we're to do it.
Given how bad AI is at design plus all the unstoppable slop train, I expect websites to become much, much worse.
In today's world of AI it's fairly easy to make your site compatible with every version of internet explorer ever.
Just tell the AI to do it. It'll find a way. The maintenance burden for you will be minimal because the AI can keep the legacy compatibility bits in sync.
This analogy is bad: Nobody is going to die or get food poisoning because their old browser doesn't work on a website.
A better analogy would be a restaurant deciding not to cater to the 1% of the US population that have celiac disease (cannot eat gluten), or the 2% that have issues with dairy.
Covering for the 2% is often not a sound first order business decision. There's certainly higher order benefits. A lot of accessibility features are just plain useful for anyone. And I think companies like Apple generally get that it's a kind of loss leader. But this article makes dishonest TV Shopping Network style arguments like pointing at 150 million as if that was ever an addressable market.
I think either you argue for regulation, or you argue more honestly: asserting that the extra cost will likely never directly pay for itself, but it is some of the secret sauce that can a good product into a great one.
I'd say you're the most correct of the bunch in this discussion. In the vast majority of business ventures the vast majority of your population is not going to be a customer, ever.
Look at statistics of things like apple vs android users and their purchase behaviors. Targeting the Apple users will likely bring in far more money in the end.
Also it's not your job as a company to ensure the user stays up to date and secure. Old devices are really just a risk these days.
I agree the general premise but do not agree when it comes to browser support.
I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
This is very context dependent. It's 'fine' having such attitude when it comes to a hobby project or personal website – not so much for ecommerce site. And imo you are missing the key part of the article – graceful degradation.
Designing for the ideal (or for the <98%) is fine. As long as the experience is gracefully degraded for the rest.
I have a gripe with this attitude because it goes beyond browser use. Inserting the new fancy thing everywhere is often unnecessary and affects accessibility in a negative way for a nonneglible number of your users. And that was the point of the article, right?
Taking the conversation slightly outside the original context: if I go to a restaurant, should I have a phone and an app ready so that I can order food? If I go to the gym, should I have a gym app ready so that I can sign in? I don't like having to do that. But that's just another instance of this same attitude.
>> I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
And I don't give a shit about your site/content/whatever. If you don't work with Firefox or my old Mac browser, your whatever isn't worth my time. For "content" sites this is insanely true, even for "news".
What you describe is not feasible in competitive mature markets like good part of e-commerce.
As of 2024 at one of my clients we were still supporting IE8 and as of 2026 I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9 and 11 or ancient firefox/chrome versions.
The reason is quite simple when you analyze the data: it's concentrated between 8.30 and 5.30 pm.
Those are people sitting at their desk in a bank or some different office. They cannot install other browsers, they cannot update them. Their perfectly working computers (for their job) may not even support newest browsers at all.
Losing 2-6% of the office hours traffic of those well paid-stable job individuals has an outsized impact on revenue and margins that cannot be estimated by naive data analysis.
In other sectors many users are B2B2C retailers in machinery or carpentry using the same computer they bought 15 years ago and they need to provide a quote to the customer in front of them. Single orders can easily be 5 or even 6 figures.
Small numbers in many sectors not only matter they have an outsized impact and a compounding effect long term.
Depends on the revenue they bring vs the cost of serving them. It's highly dependent on market/business/company.
Often you simply don't offer the feature. E.g 3d rendered previews may not be available but product configuration and cart keeps working on a shop selling custom showers (you fallback to dynamic static images).
In real estate a page displaying fancy maps with price statistics by area/neighborhood might be unavailable, but the core business of listings and search does.
Fifteen years! Unless it's a government agency what's the point even in doing business with a company that uses 15 y.o. browser? They will pay you in silver coins according to 2011 prices.
The people that work there are the customer, not the company itself.
And they mostly check your website when they are bored at work. Not when they leave it and have kids, hobbies or a household to care for.
In travel sector users predominantly navigate in office hours from their work devices. You go meet them where they are. 4% of 6 million daily users is 240'000 potential customers. Converting 3% of them means millions at the end of the year.
Maybe some like airbnb have (or at least used to have) a unique catalogue and they can play a different game and afford to lose some money.
Most e-commerces play differently, at different scales and enjoy different moats and different shareholders/owners expectations.
Why? There are no features which aren't supported by 10 year old browsers which can bring more sales or improve the user experience. So who are these new features good for?
That spells lost sales if you're doing it as a job. Or at least lack of access for people with older devices if you're doing it as a hobby. Then it's of course your call.
This whole article is a categorical error. Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context. You can argue endlessly by shifting the topic that 98% is used on. I guess that's what people are doing here.
I had this argument with people working on VR headsets, where a physical parameter was designed to cover the 5th to 95th percentile. I had to point out that flat-out excluding 10% of the population is a pretty crappy starting point...
while true, the people who will read this and then think twice about implementing and applying things are exactly the people who already doing too much thinking
I blame it in big part on the WebDX community group, their absolutely useless "Baseline" guidelines, and on them allowing Apple to be part of that group and make decisions on what features are "ready" to use whilst being behind the only non-evergreen browser in 2026.
The "baseline" means nothing. The percentage in caniuse means nothing. The only number that matters is the number of Safari users stuck using a no longer supported Apple device that access your website. Of course Apple makes sure to hide usage stats of older devices.
Everyone complains about only having three browser engines out there, but I'll be happy to go down to two if that means freeing the world from Safari.
I think this single fact is a major source of enshittification in large software products, especially in the era of ML/AI. If your quality is 99%, it sounds like "you have solved your task", but in reality there is a long tail that over time affects nearly every customer.
I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboard panes load normally (so a dashboard with 20 panes is broken in nearly 1 in 5 loads), and so on. If your LLM gets 99% of tool calls right, nearly every session will contain a malformed tool call.
When measuring and reporting models to the non-saavy, I usually reframe them into odds. One failure for every 49 successes is a scary failure rate when operating at a large scale.
This is largely why I don't condone LLMs in operational pipelines. Your workflow? Fine. The company's? Hell no.
It's almost as if context matters for random numbers. A 98% success rate for a parachute is criminal, but if I could achieve 98% of my goals, I couldn't be happier.
Software standards are way too low these days. If you can't do at least 5 9s in everything you ship get out of the industry and humanity will be better off.
If for 2% of users a webpage will not look as awesome as intended (it's not guaranteed that it will be broken), that's ok. It's not poisoning - it's a 98% chance of getting a top mark.
100% of this will be self-inflicted no javascript and 0% of the people who I am targeting.
The Galaxy Brain isn't global usage, it is overlapping populations. Will any percentage of them care about any percentage of me?
Put another way, many people decided to effectively drop support for IE11. When my client has even a single client who still uses IE11, we don't drop support even when it is "bad to support it". But when that drops to zero, regardless of what anyone else is doing, then we can drop support for IE11.
>> But a restaurant where clients don’t get of food poisoning 98% of time is getting people sick on a monthly (or even weekly) basis.
Objectively, I think it's impossible to work in the food industry and avoid food poisoning 100% of the time. One of the reasons I never attempted several of my food industry business ideas. I'm certain they would be at least profitable enough to keep going, would be rather trivial to access EU subsidy money in the €50k, but the amount of regulations and inspections terrifies me. And I'm sure at some point, some salmonella or what else would slip through and don't wanna deal with the consequences.
Easier with programming computers since a "bug" won't make people expell waste simultaneously through both incoming and outgoing food orifices, like it happend to me last time I ordered sarmale from a local restaurant. Like in the food industry a "bug" is literally that.
If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen.
As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update their browser once a year or better.
The tradeoff is code complexity and engineering time, vs having a larger market. And that's going to be an individual situation for every company.
5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome!
> works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people
If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my food either. I don't need to make 8 billion people happy for my restaurant to survive. I only need to make ~1000 people happy who keep returning for anniversaries, birthdays, and the pure enjoyment of creativity with food.
I was a yacht chef for years and only needed to make 10 people happy. The technique I used was everyone eats the same thing, crew and guests. Saving money doing my own shopping instead of relying on provisioning companies that would send me food not handled correctly, my monthly expense went from ~$30k to ~$10k when guests are on board a month -- food in St. Barts was flown in from France everyday and expensive, circa 2005, so I could afford to serve the chateaubriand, osso bucco, and everything else to the crew. Therefore, what I wanted to eat everyday which likely was balanced, had lots of fiber, and healthier choices was the thing that everyone ate everyday.
People ask if the guests and owners would tell me what they want to eat everyday. The Mister was CEO of a fortune 500 company and when retired still chairman of the board. This guy was making billion dollar decisions everyday and the Mrs. was very busy also. The last thing they want to do is answer what is for dinner every night. They delegated the decision making to me. I always cooked what I wanted to eat and was always correct.
It is impossible to make everyone happy. Don't try -- it will break you.
Anyone who has ever done website or mobile development knows there is a huge array of browsers and platforms, and supporting the very long tail of configurations is sometimes nearly impossible, let alone almost never cost effective. When I last ran some web apps, we'd see substantial numbers of errors just due to f'd up (or sometimes outright malicious) browser plugins. I'm not checking every random configuration of browser plugins against my website to ensure they all work.
Like you say, it really depends, which is why I hate blanket directives like the article gave. If suddenly 2% of people couldn't log into gmail, that would be a huge deal affecting 10s of millions of people. As the adage goes, "You're not Google", and for a lot of small e-commerce websites trying to fix someone on some decade+ old browser just doesn't make sense (and, as another comment mentioned, these users are often the least likely to convert in any case).
I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you deliberately choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? All these choices deliberately made during development add up to the product you deliver at the end of the day.
When a developer says "it's too expensive to develop this for a dozen configurations" that just means they have already chosen to make their applications inaccessible, and are justifying it after the fact.
For example, Uber, a Visa immigration website, low cost air carrier booking site, etc.
As long as it’s credibly offered without too many caveats.
There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason.
These people just use the sites that work. They aren't computer experts, and might not even realise why half the internet doesn't work - they just think that's the way things are.
> There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers.
How many people have 10 year old phones? I've got an 8 year old iPhone XR which I keep around as a backup/travel device because it's not worth selling, and the battery is… not happy even in airplane mode.
For me to have a 10 year old mobile browser, I'd have to have kept the iPhone SE 1 (or was it a 5c?) that I bought second hand in 2018, and not upgraded it since I bought it. I got rid of it because the battery wouldn't hold a charge for 10 minutes.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
I use a browser that had its last release less than a year ago. It doesn't do CSS, it doesn't do javascript and I love it. I also love to be able to use the websites I need.
Sometimes you want to give certain people an incentive to not be your customers because your company would be entirely better off if they were someone else’s customer.
If your web app crashes one out of every fifty times I launch it, it's not good. The business side of things is reasonable to prioritize right up until it isn't.
If you're using a different, random browser every time you access our web app, you're in a minority far smaller than 2%. Or you've shared your account with 50 friends, and we'd prefer that you do that with someone else's app anyway.
Of course 98% of sterilization is not enough for surgery or for precision in calculating your account balance but the category of landing page conversion a 98% would be astronomically high.
I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver a code to my number. I tried a few numbers from our household and they all failed.
Searching for this issue yielded a bunch of results, so it was definitely a known issue, but there wasn't anything I could do, really. To them, it's simple math. Another SMS provider that covers my (tiny EU) country might be more expensive. They might be avoiding scammers that used my mobile operator in the past. Whatever it is, it would probably cost them more than they lose in ticket sales.
Without some government entity to force them, they don't give a shit about me being able to see an event.
There is a point where technology becomes foundational for participating in society. And then it needs to be regulated to be available to everyone.
We don’t see this in practice to though. Three examples:
1. In the airline industry big airlines don’t go everywhere for this reasons but small local airlines fill the gap due to market opportunity.
2. Changes in technology enable big companies to operate more efficiently. See starlink.
3. Big companies know that ubiquity is important for their brand. In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US.
Also it's not just Wales where Beeching carried out intense vandalism of public infrastructure, the South West was severely affected too. Basically anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power. The general assumption was that private cars would replace the local trains, which as someone who currently doesn't drive for medical reasons really makes my blood boil. While perhaps not in intent, in effect the Beeching Axe was a profound kick in the teeth for the disabled.
Did nobody ever operate rail to those cities again due to them being rural?
Oh I see (thanks to that edit). I mean, I agree with you. This is just the additional amusing detail that government-run services are still subject to a sort of dulled and homogenous version of market forces, which can be worse for small local concerns because it's less responsive. Though, admittedly, a giant corporation can simulate government very well, and can be just as crap.
> A few of these routes have since reopened. Some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes
> Some, such as the bulk of the Midland Metro network around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, have since been incorporated into light rail lines.
Furthermore, the transformation to other transportation forms suggests this event also coincides with changing technology.
You’re not wrong, but small and rural airports would not be able to maintain even these routes without EAS (essential air services) subsidies
"In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US." You know they use the Postal Service for last miles often? And the Postal Service is required by law to service far-flung places. So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
Did you miss the part where the conversation was about Ticketmaster and rails were used as an analogy for understanding the problem?
> So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
I don’t think that’s true as I can buy many things on Amazon which cannot be shipped via USPS.
These are attitudes come from the privilege of never having been in that 2% of users, and I think we have them until that one day we end up being in that 2% and can't use the system ourselves.
When I wrote iOS apps, I was constantly infuriated by the tech lead's and product management's insistence to only support the current major OS version and the previous one. Engineers would take time out of their day to rip out support for iOS X-2 (rather than fixing bugs, working on performance or features)! Code that wasn't in the way of refactors, wasn't really buggy, wasn't harming anything architecturally. To me, it just looked like Griefing The User. I didn't get it and I still don't. Now, I have a 8 year old phone, and lo and behold, half of the apps in the AppStore don't even work on it anymore because of this attitude, so I guess I'm firmly in the 2%.
Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.
But sometimes small differences at the edges are indeed small, particularly for expected values. Say you win 100 dollars with 98% probability vs with 99.9% probability.
The expected value (probability * dollars) of the latter is only slightly higher than the former ($99.9-$98=$1.90) even though the difference in odds is very large: (0.999/0.001)/(0.98/0.02)≈20.39. So the 99.9% probability is odds 999 to 1, 98% probability is 49 to 1, so the former has more than 20 times higher odds, but the expected amount of money you win is almost the same.
CSS on a website, however, you CAN get partial credit (to an extent). It may not be perfect, but it's at least theoretically still providing some value partially.
I think knowing what kind of problem you're facing is really important when it comes to measuring percentage of "complete".
If I'm one of the 2% then that's everything for me. Maybe I have good reasons to be in the 2%. And maybe, not caring about that is wrong.
I would rather have a website that only works for 2% of people for the right reason, than a website that doesn't work for 2% for the wrong reason.
I mentioned 3 years ago that Firefox at 2.2% is dangerously close the being unsupported on government websites, and at this point it's now at 1.9%.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603
https://analytics.usa.gov/ says "There were 1.66 billion sessions in the last 30 days." - so 2% is 33 million sessions if I did my math right.
I assume Firefox users over proportionally use privacy extensions.Thus they overproportionally won't appear on Google Analytics and similar places, which for some statistics reduces the numbers even more than reality.
It may sound like a small deal to not carry one brand of chocolate paste but if some customers then also don't buy the 12 other groceries they need at your shop, it doesn't really matter that it's only 2% of products that were discontinued. Supermarket products are so stable not because nobody ever makes anything new but because changing a small percentage frustrates customers
If I can't order from some website, I stop trying. Maybe next week the ESR browser gets an update and it works again but by then I'm not clicking those links in the search results
"What, do you not live your life based on 99th percentiles?"
I tend to think of work as upside-based on downside-based. Most feature work is upside. 10% lift on conversions is great, 40% adoption is winning, and you're playing for the moonshot of 10x. Infra work is downside-based. 98% secure, 98% available, 98% acceptable performance -- that'll all failure. Winning means the thing works as expected and nobody notices.
Not everything sorts cleanly into upside vs. downside, but a lot does. Allocate your risk accordingly.
(Of course, this assumes that each decision is independent, which, when you're talking about browser support for CSS, is certainly not the case.)
With CUDA you try to keep all threads doing the same thing. Sometimes that’s very difficult, but if each thread does the same thing 98% of the time, is that enough? Well since there are warps of 32 connected threads, you might expect the probability that any thread in the warp diverges to be .98^32, or 50% of the time spent with one thread in the diverged code. 50% still doesn’t sound that bad unless threads diverge at different times, and then 50% warp divergence might mean a 16x slowdown overall. 98% isn’t enough in this case.
Well I wasn't very far off I guess! Perhaps "5 nines" is a good threshold for new CSS features too?
it that reduces development/maintenance cost by a lot, that's not a terrible deal.
Arguably, if you only have a website, that won't work for anyone without access to the Internet. So then you should have a physical presence in each of those people's location, and arguably you shouldn't provide any improvements that give me more than physical presence does, so you should not have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office.
If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it.
And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.
Most websites are glorified rich text or forms. And most of the rest should be that. This is even more true for the kinds of websites people need to use rather than some designers art experiments. They don't actually need all these fancy features except to make their developer's work slightly easier.
in this sense, related https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
The second biggest thing is progressive enhancement. The author picked a CSS feature (nesting) that is basically all-or-nothing: the site will basically be entirely broken for those 2% if you swap Sass for native nesting. Most features aren't like that; maybe the site won't look pixel-perfect on old browsers, or one bit of functionality won't work, but by and large it will still be functional. In those cases, I think it's a much easier decision in terms of where to draw the cutoff.
So, 10% of android users dont have web features beyond, at best, June 2025.
caniuse.com does not track this - they lump all Chrome for android together in the latest version.
This is painful as someone who wants to make use of some very useful, powerful new features, but is targeting people who are most likely to have old, slow, not-updated devices...
I've been in the two ends of this situation, in the 2% with older iPhones and Android devices, and in the 98% with new devices. The 2% cannot hold a tyranny over the absolute majority, and vice versa. Everything must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Hmm, it could be fat enterprise clients with locked-down software versions (legacy, security etc.) That's where most of the money is, isn't it?
If you're selling tickets to a venue, then your site is blocked by them anyway.
This article is a weird extremist take.
I used to work in company where we have spent a lot of time making custom fixes for our software in order to work-around wired hardware/software bugs on machines of individual customers. Yes, we provided service for remaining 2% or so, but in cost of slowing-down overall product development and not making our product better for remaining 98%.
People who don't update browsers for years (or even decades) do so willingly.
Your classifier might be 98% accurate and it may sound like a lot.
But if it sits inside a car, making thousands of decisions during every trip then you may be in deep trouble.
That's a bit lower than I would be comfortable with, however not that bad, we have been even considering switching all our images to AVIF: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF
And google uses Webp all over the place and that's sitting at 96% https://caniuse.com/webp
Author's 98% take is a bit misguided.
A professional B2B car parts dealer has a very different user profile than say, a local news site in rural Africa.
A site selling concert tickets (for popular artist) probably won't care if site doesn't work for 5% of visitors, the tickets will just take a bit longer to sell out.
But otoh I'm sure there's many businesses out there who wouldn't mind a 2..5% bump in conversion ratio for very little effort.
Personally I don't care. If I'm out to buy something online & webshop doesn't work or takes too long to load, my purchase goes elsewhere.
And ofc government services should be very conservative in this respect.
Edit: and yes, graceful degradation. It's ok if site doesn't look as intended but is still useable for that 2%. And eg. I love that some news site have a text-only lite version.
What they say is that you have to ensure that your site still works for the remaining users, through graceful degradation.
If people have new fancy browsers, use their features to make the interface jazzy. If they don't, ensure that the site still offers its core functionality to them without the fancy features.
It kind of makes me wonder if anyone has made a build system / framework that serves nested CSS to modern browsers, and falls back to a preprocessed CSS file that removes all the nesting for older browsers.
https://caniuse.com/ciu/settings#usage
WebP is especially hated for this among non-techies (31.8k upvotes, 1 month ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1trpuvr/...
In some categories, certainty and percentages make a lot of difference--surgeries, accidents. In some, they don't--surveys, grades.
It just depends on the category.
This is akin to saying something as obvious as more percentages are more than less percentages.
Suppose 98% users have not had any sessions crash. You want to build an addon feature that 10% of your users will buy and which will increase the revenue from those users by 30%.
Do you spend time building the feature, or trying to understand why 2% of users sometimes see crashes?
Just like the article says, it depends on if the product is an essential or a dessert.
If your product is a "essential necessity" one, then 98% is terrible for your software.
If your product is a "dessert", then for it's software 98% is awesome.
Sure, it's called a 'dress code'.
Yes, because all of us have website serving, checks notes, the entire world...
98% is probably in the neighborhood of 8% more than I'd require for browsers compatibility before deciding to use a new feature. At a certain people need to update and we do ourselves and our other 98% of customers no favors by catering to the lowest common denominator.
See also, the story of YouTube adding a banner pushing people to upgrade off old IE version being a large factor in people upgrading. Now, obviously, we aren't all running YouTube-sized sites but building for ancient browsers is, very often, a large waste of time.
In the age of evergreen browsers you have to go out of your way to be using something that's not at most a couple years out of date.
This reminds me almost precisely of the dynamics of pro sports in the US and how fans are getting priced out of attending games or even watching teams on TV as organizations shift to bespoke streaming platforms.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Best-Viewed-with-Interne...
this is your brain on data science. so absurd that i laughed out loud when i read "like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them" like what is that phrase doing in this sentence and argument
How do you justify this when you factor in cost and time?
98% market share? Amazing. 98% browser support? There are 15 billion screens in the world. 2% of that is 300 million. Hardly a number we can ignore. Edge cases for those 2% should be considered and implemented
Websites are surprisingly hard to maintain long term, specially for a broad audience of devices. Developer Experience can lead to better UX, the easier it is to build/maintain, the more likely we're to do it.
Given how bad AI is at design plus all the unstoppable slop train, I expect websites to become much, much worse.
Just tell the AI to do it. It'll find a way. The maintenance burden for you will be minimal because the AI can keep the legacy compatibility bits in sync.
This is the new Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
A better analogy would be a restaurant deciding not to cater to the 1% of the US population that have celiac disease (cannot eat gluten), or the 2% that have issues with dairy.
Don't look at the simple probability - look at probability * value.
Isn't that a named law?
I think either you argue for regulation, or you argue more honestly: asserting that the extra cost will likely never directly pay for itself, but it is some of the secret sauce that can a good product into a great one.
Look at statistics of things like apple vs android users and their purchase behaviors. Targeting the Apple users will likely bring in far more money in the end.
Also it's not your job as a company to ensure the user stays up to date and secure. Old devices are really just a risk these days.
I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
Designing for the ideal (or for the <98%) is fine. As long as the experience is gracefully degraded for the rest.
Profit is often at the margin.
Taking the conversation slightly outside the original context: if I go to a restaurant, should I have a phone and an app ready so that I can order food? If I go to the gym, should I have a gym app ready so that I can sign in? I don't like having to do that. But that's just another instance of this same attitude.
And I don't give a shit about your site/content/whatever. If you don't work with Firefox or my old Mac browser, your whatever isn't worth my time. For "content" sites this is insanely true, even for "news".
As of 2024 at one of my clients we were still supporting IE8 and as of 2026 I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9 and 11 or ancient firefox/chrome versions.
The reason is quite simple when you analyze the data: it's concentrated between 8.30 and 5.30 pm.
Those are people sitting at their desk in a bank or some different office. They cannot install other browsers, they cannot update them. Their perfectly working computers (for their job) may not even support newest browsers at all.
Losing 2-6% of the office hours traffic of those well paid-stable job individuals has an outsized impact on revenue and margins that cannot be estimated by naive data analysis.
In other sectors many users are B2B2C retailers in machinery or carpentry using the same computer they bought 15 years ago and they need to provide a quote to the customer in front of them. Single orders can easily be 5 or even 6 figures.
Small numbers in many sectors not only matter they have an outsized impact and a compounding effect long term.
It's been 15 years since IE9. Where do you draw the line?
Often you simply don't offer the feature. E.g 3d rendered previews may not be available but product configuration and cart keeps working on a shop selling custom showers (you fallback to dynamic static images).
In real estate a page displaying fancy maps with price statistics by area/neighborhood might be unavailable, but the core business of listings and search does.
Fifteen years! Unless it's a government agency what's the point even in doing business with a company that uses 15 y.o. browser? They will pay you in silver coins according to 2011 prices.
And they mostly check your website when they are bored at work. Not when they leave it and have kids, hobbies or a household to care for.
In travel sector users predominantly navigate in office hours from their work devices. You go meet them where they are. 4% of 6 million daily users is 240'000 potential customers. Converting 3% of them means millions at the end of the year.
Maybe some like airbnb have (or at least used to have) a unique catalogue and they can play a different game and afford to lose some money.
Most e-commerces play differently, at different scales and enjoy different moats and different shareholders/owners expectations.
The "baseline" means nothing. The percentage in caniuse means nothing. The only number that matters is the number of Safari users stuck using a no longer supported Apple device that access your website. Of course Apple makes sure to hide usage stats of older devices.
Everyone complains about only having three browser engines out there, but I'll be happy to go down to two if that means freeing the world from Safari.
I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboard panes load normally (so a dashboard with 20 panes is broken in nearly 1 in 5 loads), and so on. If your LLM gets 99% of tool calls right, nearly every session will contain a malformed tool call.
Probabilities are hard for humans, probably.
This is largely why I don't condone LLMs in operational pipelines. Your workflow? Fine. The company's? Hell no.
Whether 98% is acceptable, it depends on the cost of failure, not the percentage itself.
"99 and a half won't do"
https://youtu.be/1QVJCjbgM-s
Holy Disciples
Trying to Make a Hundred
Hover text: You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.
Software standards are way too low these days. If you can't do at least 5 9s in everything you ship get out of the industry and humanity will be better off.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/No-JavaScript_notes
The Galaxy Brain isn't global usage, it is overlapping populations. Will any percentage of them care about any percentage of me?
Put another way, many people decided to effectively drop support for IE11. When my client has even a single client who still uses IE11, we don't drop support even when it is "bad to support it". But when that drops to zero, regardless of what anyone else is doing, then we can drop support for IE11.
Objectively, I think it's impossible to work in the food industry and avoid food poisoning 100% of the time. One of the reasons I never attempted several of my food industry business ideas. I'm certain they would be at least profitable enough to keep going, would be rather trivial to access EU subsidy money in the €50k, but the amount of regulations and inspections terrifies me. And I'm sure at some point, some salmonella or what else would slip through and don't wanna deal with the consequences.
Easier with programming computers since a "bug" won't make people expell waste simultaneously through both incoming and outgoing food orifices, like it happend to me last time I ordered sarmale from a local restaurant. Like in the food industry a "bug" is literally that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 comes to mind. Many of the really consequential ones end up on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs