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.
This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.
(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.
You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.
(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.
(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.
(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).
If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.
> It is impossible to make everyone happy. Don't try
The older I get the more valuable this lesson
>I always cooked what I wanted to eat and was always correct.
This is similar advice to what I've read recently about the target audience for technical/blog writings - only write to one person and it's best if that person is 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.
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 of anything, 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 choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? Obviously, it's a trade-off, and no final product is going to work on 100% of configurations. All these choices deliberately made during development add up to the product you deliver at the end of the day. All I'm asking is that we recognize browser/platform incompatibility/inaccessibility as choices and not some inherent property of software.
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.
That is neglecting network effects. Less than 10% of the US population is vegetarian, but if a restaurant doesn't have any vegetarian options they lose business not just from that 10% but from any party that has a single vegetarian. Likewise, if a website has any social network effect, disregarding a portion of the population will decrease use from a much larger percentage than those directly affected.
Furthermore, even if your site functionality has no social networking component itself, all business are subject to the network effects of word of mouth. People are much more likely to share negative experiences that positive ones, so if 1/50 of people find your site to be broken, then a considerable amount of feedback online will be negative and will harm your reputation for the entire market, not just that 2%.
Finally, in business you have to work hard to win over even a small portion of your total addressable market. Artificially decreasing your TAM can be fine if it is an intentional strategic decision to focus on a specific market, but pointless to exclude people without good reason. Not having vegetarian options at BBQ restaurant in Texas is harmless - no one goes there for that, but if you are running a more general restaurant it would be foolish not to have a few vegetarian options. Excluding people because your web developers are too lazy to use approaches that have worked fine for the last 20 years and need to use the new shiny is even more foolish.
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.
Browsers have been good enough for pretty much every reasonable purpose for more than 10 years, and compatibility has been really good for that long as well. Is it really challenging or costly to support a feature set that old? In 2017 an app I built worked on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge without any effort or testing other than on Chrome. It still supports all those. At that time, there were probably more than 2% IE users on the general internet but this was B2B.
Just a couple of up-front choices regarding css frameworks and polyfill libraries were all that was required to do that.
I'm open to believing it could be costly for some projects, but I'm more inclined to believe its mostly chasing FOTM, ignorance and laziness that leads to < 98% support.
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.
The same way people generally equate luddism with anything. By entirely misunderstanding what it was to make a point that sounds snappy without all of that boring understanding history stuff.
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.
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 may be a different 2% every time. Eventually you can cover 100% of your users with 2% 50 times, and 100% of your users will feel your software only works 98% of the time. You can get a reputation as an unreliable vendor.
That can happen but it's usually not that extreme. But you should think about it. Negative reputation spreads faster than positive.
And if your software already supports something then all you have to do is not break it. That's usually easier than making it work then first time.
There's no reason code complexity or engineering time has to increase. You can just use the older version features everywhere instead of forking the supported versions.
That's a very mercenary attitude. If less than 2% of your (potential) users had a particular disability, would you implement accessibility features for them without being forced to? I'd argue that it's the right thing to do. Some restrictions like using an old browser may be more or less a choice, but it's still a much better look to be inclusive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“profit motivated” means taking as much as possible while giving as little as possible in return. The ideal situation for a profit motivated company would be collecting all of the money people have and delivering nothing. Thieves are also profit motivated.
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.
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%.
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.
In some cases (like this), 99.99% isn't enough. 100% is mandatory.
I moved into my house a few months ago and while I was exercising my foot discovered a nail that I guess was left by the previous homeowner/tenant/builder. Fortunately it was just a scratch, but it could have easily turned into a trip to the ER.
With a baby learning to walk and crawl, the tolerance for cleaning up nails on the floor is absolutely 100% (or 0% nail) so I scoured the entire house carpet with a strong magnet to ensure there no other surprises. I did this several times just to make sure
This was a few months ago and yet I still tend to have anxiety when walking on the carpet now.
It's like those antibacterial soaps that remove 99.9 percent of bacteria. It's not obvious whether that's number of bacteria or type of bacteria but either way the remaining ones are probably in the millions and of many types.
Sanitizing efficacy is total organism count. Hand sanitizers are regulated by the FDA and tested in vivo using ASTM 1174 (Health Care Personnel Handwash / HCPHW test) and ASTM 2755. E1174 tests for Serratia marcescens or Escherichia coli. E2755 tests for S. marcescens or Staphylococcus aureus. ASTM E1174-21 includes a precision and accuracy statement. The FDA explains: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/09/06/2016-21...
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.
Tangentially, but 5-day vs 4-day workweek is somewhat similar. You've not only reduced your working days by 20%, but you've also increased your days off by 50%.
It's contextual depending on which end of the probability is the desired outcome.
SPF is like this. SPF 30 allows 1/30th (3%) of the UV through it, blocking 29/30ths (97%). SPF 50 (2%) allows 1/50th, blocking 49/50ths (98%). Using the denominator, in this case, expressed the efficacy much more intuitively.
Comparing SPF 30 vs 50 better expresses the increase in efficacy than 97% vs 98% does.
One could also express it as the amount that passes the filter but it is Sun _Protection_ Factor not Sun _Transparency_ Factor.
On the other hand, it's completely unintuitive that "Sun Protection Factor 30 = 1/30th of UV light passes through it", and I had no idea there was any correlation before this comment.
The only intuitive bit about that system is "bigger number does more." I feel like I would have more readily understood it if it just said "blocks 97% (or 98%) of UV light" instead of numbers I assumed were somewhat arbitrary.
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.
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
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
Dunno. I stopped shopping at Aldi because we always needed to visit another store anyway, so for me that theory still holds. They've also taken cheap veggie chocolate milk out of the assortment, and the store next door introduced it, so there isn't any unique(ly cheap) product there that I can't get at the more expensive store and that's where we now do all our shopping. We only ever still visit Aldi when the Edeka, next door, is out of some product that Aldi has
In trying to find the exact figure earlier, I did see a paper where they classified people as one-, two-, or three-stop shoppers. Seems to be common, seeing as a lot of stores here are actually adjacent. You don't see that much in NL where I'm from. Anyway, I didn't end up finding back this figure and I don't know to which market this was supposed to apply; maybe in places like France the hypermarkets have everything without being expensive and it applies more to that? All results I found were about how amazing this company's loyalty cards are and you (the supermarket) should totally introduce them for better retention
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".
Yeah, this is sort of the problem with a percentage-based approach. You are better with a "pick the top 3 implementations" in most cases - that bags you Webkit, Blink, and Gecko in the browser example, and since we're ignoring the long-tail in either case, that's probably good enough
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.
A lot of the time it's not software developers who define it and it's about the budget. Usually it's the product decision. E.g. an agency who has constant recurring experience with it might indicate that supporting N% browsers costs this much with cost increasing the higher the percentage. E.g. you want to use CSS flex you might get 97% to 99% of all World users, because there's going to be certain percentage for which it won't work.
If you claim to support those old browsers you will need to test with them too and be able to easily spin up etc It's not just knowledge of what you can or can't use, it will be extra permutations of testing everything.
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...
Which seems to indicate about 4.8% are below Android 9.
But also, Firefox for Android still supports Android 8, of which there are 1.7% below.
There's a discussion to be made here about who is dropping support for these users, is it Google (and especially Apple, who doesn't allow other browsers on iOS) or the site owner? Especially given how insecure it is to use outdated browsers.
You're misinterpreting the stats. Those are not "updated" - they're from Dec 1, 2025 and are the latest that are available from Android Studio (I just checked again).
If you add up the distribution inclusive of Android 9 (which is what I was trying to refer to, perhaps unsuccessfully), it is 9.2%. That corresponds with the 90.7% Cumulative Distribution for Android 10
If you're arguing that it is Google who is dropping support/making people have insecure browsers, we're in agreement. As with Safari (or at least those at Apple who control/fund Safari), the Android team is very anti-Web/Chrome. Lots has been written about all of that at https://infrequently.org.
Also, since this article/post is about 98%, Android 7 and below account for 2% of usage still, and its max Chrome version is 124, which was released in April 2024.
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.
Most common methodologies were already garbage even a few years ago, with general consensus being that Firefox was probably undercounted by at least 30%; and in more technical arenas, it can be a lot higher, perhaps up to 80%. (Unfortunately, that’s still probably not a lot.)
Even back then, Chrome was commonly being significantly overcounted due to user-agent string shenanigans. And these days I’m confident (without any figures, or even relevant recent commercial experience) that will have increased sharply. I expect that it is now massively overcounted, at the same time as Firefox is significantly undercounted.
Statcounter is particularly commonly used, and honestly one of the worst. Its mobile figures, for example, are completely useless because they don’t report browser versions. CanIUse figures (which lean heavily but not solely on Statcounter) are lousy and unrealistic due to some of these sorts of issues, and just generally being out of date. (I examined the matter closely on 2023-05-27 and the figures corresponded with being about six weeks behind.)
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 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.
If a fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”.
Close, but the other way round. Don't avoid a feature because it lacks good enough support. Write code to progressively enhance the experience if the feature is supported in the user's browser. If you're not willing to do that, then don't use the feature.
Progressive enhancement today means you can use pretty much any browser feature you want. You just have to do a bit of legwork with some @supports or JS prototype checking after doing the basic version first. It's not really much extra work.
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.
I’m a bit skeptical of the accuracy of the traffic data claimed in this article, 30% of users not being able to use baseline widely available features is a suspiciously large number. Unless this is a very unique set of users, I doubt that it is accurate. Maybe bot traffic messing up the data?
For context, baseline widely available requires that your browser have updated at some point in 2023, which happens automatically for almost all users. For mobile devices, any device that supports Android >= 7.0 or iOS >= 17 would meet this requirement. Chrome even supported Windows 7 through Feb 2023, too.
* iOS >= 17.0 covers 95% of global active iOS devices
* Android >= 7.0 covers at least 99% of global active Android devices
It seems reasonable to me to drop support for Windows XP, IE, and phones that are a decade or more old (iPhone 8, Galaxy S5). And if you claim to be supporting stuff that old, but you don’t test your site on it, you’re just kidding yourself.
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.)
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.
Over the last year, only ~70% of the visiting browsers supported the new CSS features. Even thought this feature is “widely supported” in a general audience, for my audience, it left out 30% of the visitors.
That mirrors my experience using web pages to order things. They work ~70% of the time. Often while I sit there repeatedly pressing a 'buy' button that does nothing, or playing around with my browser's development tools to try and fix it client side, I wonder how often physical stores cash registers fail, in comparison. Just yesterday I tried to order from a site called buttonworks.com, but the order page only worked in Firefox, and the account/payment pages only worked in Chrome, and I gave up on trying to copy cookies from one browser to another and went with purebuttons.com.
When I had appendicitis seven years ago, I went to the emergency room, found out I would need surgery, and was (I think understandably) scared.
I texted a friend about that while I was waiting and he, trying to make me feel better, said something like "Dude, appendectomies are pretty routine, there's probably like a 99% survival rate" for them.
That that did not make me feel better. If I asked you to guess a number between 1 and 100, and you guessed corrected, I would only be a little impressed. 1 in 100 things happen all the time!
Obviously, I didn't die, and it worked out pretty routinely, but I always think about that particular situation when I hear about things being "98% successful".
> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
On the flipside, if a client enters enough venues that refuse entry to them because of something the client can fix on their end, eventually the client will probably change themselves -- "If you meet one asshole during your day" and all that.
To bring the analogy back to browsers, if a website works fine for a client, they'll have no pressure to change anything on their end -- why upgrade from Windows XP when the site looks fine in IE6? Eventually the client is forced to upgrade -- normally by their operating system. That works, but what if the operating system adds another 2 years to their end of life -- do you just hang on and hope the shim / hacks you added hold?
A website dedicated to promoting LASIK says the surgery “boasts a success rate of at least 96%”, and a satisfaction rate of 95%. “Long-term or chronic dry eye affects only a small minority (about 4%)” while cases requiring follow-up treatments are “typically under 5%”.
These numbers have never been particularly reassuring to me.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Serving a website is different than serving food or providing safety features. Web design can use progressive enhancement and detect available features to use as they are available.
With a website, you can have the "real" layout, but when someone is blocking your JS, you can fallback and still provide content.
We won't get every mobile application working on old browsers, but we can offer something to the end user. Even a page that lets them know they are missing out.
The problem is webdevs don't do that. They say "98% is fine" and then don't program any fallback, or worse, actively block users that don't meet 100% compatibility.
Probably because that extra 2% (or whatever figure) isn’t terrible valuable in the first place. Sometimes the best answer is “they’ll need to update their stuff”.
The whole premise of the article is fallacious analogies and mixed metaphors.
Yes a restaurant that poisons 2% of its customers is a bad restaurant. A restaurant that has nothing for people who are strict kosher, strict halal, strict vegan, or have severe multiple food allergies is not a bad restaurant. There may be 5% of people who simply can’t eat there because the kitchen cooks pork and there’s peanut shells on the ground but their idiosyncratic requirements don’t dictate the experience of the other 95%. Or 90%, or what have you.
Things like lottery tickets are "strong link" problems (the system's value equals the strongest link's value); food safety is a "weak link" problem (the safety of a meal equals the least safe bite of food).
It appears that the author is advocating for "weak link" standards for CSS (it matters more what the vast majority see, knocking it out of the park once or twice won't make up for the failures)
If you think a browser feature that's been standard since 2023 is only supported by 70% of your visitors, you're wrong. The 30% of "users" that don't support it aren't visitors, they're bots pretending to be browsers. Bots update their user-agent strings less often than users update their browsers. My experience maintaining firewall rules is that "outdated version of an evergreen browser" is a pretty reliable bot signal: those UAs correlate strongly with all of the other bot indicators (inhumanly high request rates, datacenter IPs, loading pages without loading the page's associated resources, etc).
On the other hand, if you design something to include 100% of people, you will fail, and you will not give your core audience as good of an experience as they could have gotten.
So I like the opposite approach. If there's literally one guy on the planet, and this article/app/idea changes his life... what would that look like?
I enjoyed reading the acceptable food contamination levels relating to rodent feces, Insects, bone, set by the FDA.
Likewise anyone with anaphlaxis in themselves or family will be familiar with the risk equation of "may contain" distinct from simple food adulteration: May contain is probably safer than some random restaurant using "cumin" which has nuts in it as a cheap substitution up the supply chain with no declaration.
> 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.
98% isn't much, but it's also not little. It's just a number, and numbers don't have a meaning without an interpretation. That's a fundamental logical feature, but hardly a special insight.
Decisions are about tradeoffs. 2% of users staring at a broken screen is bad, of course. But what is the _cost_ of not using nested CSS? The responsible way to make a decision is to consider both sides of the tradeoff.
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.
98% of any particular audience at a live event is well behaved. Unfortunately, in an audience of 1,000 people, that means 20 people are not well behaved, and if each of those 20 people ruins the event for their neighbors, that means at least 200 people had a bad time.
If 2% of your users complain and leave bad reviews, and only 1% leave good reviews...
> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
Actually this happens a lot more than you'd think. Every time renovations are done without consideration for wheelchair users, it's basically an improved experience that denies a percentage of people access
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
If that 30% of visitors with incompatible browsers has no overlap with the target audience you wish to reach, then what does it matter for your business?
Of course, you do not know this exactly, but the point is that it's easy to look at the wrong statistic and come to conclusions that are not necessarily useful in some context. The lens matters just as much as the percentage, if not more.
In the early days of commercial optical-character-recognition software, vendors would brag about 99% accuracy.
But a single-spaced-typewritten page has about 500 words, so you were looking at five typos every single page. It was good at the time, but you still had to manually check every single word.
> 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.
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
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.
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?
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'.
Wasn't there something in statistics to describe something like this? i.e. gaussian distributions vs something that's modeled on sparse occurrences, etc?
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.
The author is confusing visitors with customers. Refusing entry to 2% visitors? No, no! Forgetting about non-interesting 2% visitors? Not even a blink!
> 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 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.
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.
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.
I get that some companies mandate IE11, they may have IE-first internal sites, custom browser plugins, MDM configs - actual systems that would need to be updated. And MS still supports it and releases security patches for it.
But being forced to use ancient Chrome/Edge versions? You are exposing your users to half a dozen sandbox escapes, and there's no big blocker from upgrading. Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?
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?
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.
Some things are measured from 0, some are measured from 100. Depending on Expectation.
When expectation is 100%, telling me 98% success rate isn't enough. An example where the argument happens on Reddit, Macrumours and even on HN. When Apple's butterfly keyboard have issues. Apple Supporter was quick to dismiss the issue and point out the double entry is such a small issue because it is working 99.9% of the time. What they don't realise keyboard before that was practically 100%. That 0.1% error rate is infinitely more than 0%.
Another example is Internet connection When you are used to perfect Internet connection, just a small beep in disconnecting turns to be major annoyance. There are plenty of these examples especially with DOCSIS Cable modem. The modem theoretically is working 99,95% of the time, hence cable companies won't fix it. But Disconnecting 10 to 30 seconds every day is annoying enough.
I am not sure if there is a word or terminology for it so this could be better explained to people.
On the other hand, there are plenty of things where 80% is good enough, or doing above and beyond at 96% by getting 80% out of the original remaining 20%.
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.
I used to try to make the point with non-tech people using the salesman analogy: If you were a salesperson who worked inbound calls from potential customers, would you be willing to handle 1 out of every 50 calls by picking up the phone, yelling "fuck you" into it, and hanging up? That's pretty much what you're doing to your customers when your software works for 98% of them.
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 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.
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.
"Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases"
Not really. Truly robust engineering includes a cost-benefit analysis of which edge cases you handle. We don't live in a world of unlimited time & money.
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.
Reading the comments, I expected this blog post to be about something fundamental. But nope. It's just about native CSS nesting. A convenience feature that merely adopts functionality that preprocessors have long provided. Maybe I'm alone in this viewport, but this isn't even worth debating unless you, the developer, are the priority.
It reminds me of when people argued against covid restrictions saying that the virus had a 99% survival rate. A disease with a 1% infection fatality rate is a terrible disease!
Full disclosure: I also argued against covid restrictions, but not with this terrible argument.
I mean 2% have their javascript turned off (either on purpose or caused by failing extensions). 5% are behind corporate proxies that block your domain. Are you going to host the site on substack also so those 5% can access it?
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...
This is a basic ontological error, author conflates reliability and suitability
>> If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population
>> If an employer pays their employees 98% of the times, I definitely wouldn’t want to work there
Are you sure about that? 2% of the population has no bank account, will your employer agree to pay in cash?
These are different scenarios -> your employer likely cannot pay some percentage of the population; but that’s not the same as the process randomly failing (which may be worse or better depending in some cases)
Or, phrased another way: there's a reason why we consider basic availability in nines and 2 nines is still considered pretty bad. 99% uptime means being down over 7 hours each month.
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.
>Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream.
Only temporarily. Some never mRNAed their bloodstream, then everyone with brain fog forgot about the Trump vaccine and the new normal went back to normal.
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.
Weird rant, unless they meant it as a anti-corporate screed against how openly hostile US technology has become to western democracies. Definitely didn't read as that way.
>> 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.
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.
Alternatively, 98% is plenty.
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.
This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.
(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.
You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.
(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.
(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.
(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).
If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.
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> It is impossible to make everyone happy. Don't try
The older I get the more valuable this lesson
>I always cooked what I wanted to eat and was always correct.
This is similar advice to what I've read recently about the target audience for technical/blog writings - only write to one person and it's best if that person is you.
man, HN is awesome
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This sounds very fun! I would love to hear more stories if you have 'em!
Michelin, yachts... How'd you find your way to an obscure tech forum like HackerNews?
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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.
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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 of anything, 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 choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? Obviously, it's a trade-off, and no final product is going to work on 100% of configurations. All these choices deliberately made during development add up to the product you deliver at the end of the day. All I'm asking is that we recognize browser/platform incompatibility/inaccessibility as choices and not some inherent property of software.
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.
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That is neglecting network effects. Less than 10% of the US population is vegetarian, but if a restaurant doesn't have any vegetarian options they lose business not just from that 10% but from any party that has a single vegetarian. Likewise, if a website has any social network effect, disregarding a portion of the population will decrease use from a much larger percentage than those directly affected.
Furthermore, even if your site functionality has no social networking component itself, all business are subject to the network effects of word of mouth. People are much more likely to share negative experiences that positive ones, so if 1/50 of people find your site to be broken, then a considerable amount of feedback online will be negative and will harm your reputation for the entire market, not just that 2%.
Finally, in business you have to work hard to win over even a small portion of your total addressable market. Artificially decreasing your TAM can be fine if it is an intentional strategic decision to focus on a specific market, but pointless to exclude people without good reason. Not having vegetarian options at BBQ restaurant in Texas is harmless - no one goes there for that, but if you are running a more general restaurant it would be foolish not to have a few vegetarian options. Excluding people because your web developers are too lazy to use approaches that have worked fine for the last 20 years and need to use the new shiny is even more foolish.
Unfortunately some business are critical where is not an option or very expensive for someone to not use it.
For example, Uber, a Visa immigration website, low cost air carrier booking site, etc.
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.
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uber's website already requires JS to book a ride. Fortunately taxi companies still exist and can just be called by phone.
Generally most people would consider a viable option to exist even if it’s multiple times the cost…
As long as it’s credibly offered without too many caveats.
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.
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Browsers have been good enough for pretty much every reasonable purpose for more than 10 years, and compatibility has been really good for that long as well. Is it really challenging or costly to support a feature set that old? In 2017 an app I built worked on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge without any effort or testing other than on Chrome. It still supports all those. At that time, there were probably more than 2% IE users on the general internet but this was B2B.
Just a couple of up-front choices regarding css frameworks and polyfill libraries were all that was required to do that.
I'm open to believing it could be costly for some projects, but I'm more inclined to believe its mostly chasing FOTM, ignorance and laziness that leads to < 98% support.
I like how you equate 10 year old browser users with luddites?
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.
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The same way people generally equate luddism with anything. By entirely misunderstanding what it was to make a point that sounds snappy without all of that boring understanding history stuff.
Ha, I had the same thought, if you actually know the history of Luddites vs the more colloquial usage of "someone who hates all technology."
Well, being these days that a browser over 5 minutes old probably has a security flaw, it's not much of a reach.
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.
Most managers I've had preached the "80/20" rule, so 80% was good enough.
I’ll go even further.
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).
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It may be a different 2% every time. Eventually you can cover 100% of your users with 2% 50 times, and 100% of your users will feel your software only works 98% of the time. You can get a reputation as an unreliable vendor.
That can happen but it's usually not that extreme. But you should think about it. Negative reputation spreads faster than positive.
And if your software already supports something then all you have to do is not break it. That's usually easier than making it work then first time.
There's no reason code complexity or engineering time has to increase. You can just use the older version features everywhere instead of forking the supported versions.
That's a very mercenary attitude. If less than 2% of your (potential) users had a particular disability, would you implement accessibility features for them without being forced to? I'd argue that it's the right thing to do. Some restrictions like using an old browser may be more or less a choice, but it's still a much better look to be inclusive.
This is not just a question of browser age.
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.
I love lynx as much as anyone but it is ludicrous to expect webapp developers to support no script and no CSS.
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Plenty for who/what? I think you've assumed a bunch of facts that aren't true for every situation.
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.
For most businesses, yes.
If you're the national railway and your ticket purchase website doesn't work for 2% of the population, that's kind of shitty to those people.
This is sadly very common across many public infrastructure websites and apps.
or if your business plan needs to dedicate 2% of your earnings to litigation from the problems it causes.
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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.
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.
> the simple option is to cut lines serving small and rural communities
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.
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Yes, we need to update what is considered essential infrastructure in the digital age.
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.
“profit motivated” means taking as much as possible while giving as little as possible in return. The ideal situation for a profit motivated company would be collecting all of the money people have and delivering nothing. Thieves are also profit motivated.
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.
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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%.
You know this, but Apple also locks you into only supporting so old a phone when you submit to the App Store.
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.
In some cases (like this), 99.99% isn't enough. 100% is mandatory.
I moved into my house a few months ago and while I was exercising my foot discovered a nail that I guess was left by the previous homeowner/tenant/builder. Fortunately it was just a scratch, but it could have easily turned into a trip to the ER.
With a baby learning to walk and crawl, the tolerance for cleaning up nails on the floor is absolutely 100% (or 0% nail) so I scoured the entire house carpet with a strong magnet to ensure there no other surprises. I did this several times just to make sure
This was a few months ago and yet I still tend to have anxiety when walking on the carpet now.
exactly how I feel every time I weed the yard. I'll end up with a pile of weeds, look over my work and see weeds everywhere still
then close my eyes to go to sleep 10 hours later and see them all again
It's like those antibacterial soaps that remove 99.9 percent of bacteria. It's not obvious whether that's number of bacteria or type of bacteria but either way the remaining ones are probably in the millions and of many types.
Sanitizing efficacy is total organism count. Hand sanitizers are regulated by the FDA and tested in vivo using ASTM 1174 (Health Care Personnel Handwash / HCPHW test) and ASTM 2755. E1174 tests for Serratia marcescens or Escherichia coli. E2755 tests for S. marcescens or Staphylococcus aureus. ASTM E1174-21 includes a precision and accuracy statement. The FDA explains: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/09/06/2016-21...
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I love how the visual representation of that in TV ads always leaves a couple bacteria swimming around.
Removing that much bacteria from our own hands isn't even something desirable or good
I mean, unless we are doing open heart surgery with no gloves or something
Nah... a typical human hand has in the hundreds of thousands of bacteria if it hasn't been washed in awhile, not in the millions.
Washing with soap reduces it down to the thousands and sanitizers reduces it another order of magnitude down to the hundreds.
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.
Tangentially, but 5-day vs 4-day workweek is somewhat similar. You've not only reduced your working days by 20%, but you've also increased your days off by 50%.
Isn't this pretty much the entire point of the article.
Look at the HN comments and you'll see many saying they don't get the point
It's contextual depending on which end of the probability is the desired outcome.
SPF is like this. SPF 30 allows 1/30th (3%) of the UV through it, blocking 29/30ths (97%). SPF 50 (2%) allows 1/50th, blocking 49/50ths (98%). Using the denominator, in this case, expressed the efficacy much more intuitively.
Comparing SPF 30 vs 50 better expresses the increase in efficacy than 97% vs 98% does.
One could also express it as the amount that passes the filter but it is Sun _Protection_ Factor not Sun _Transparency_ Factor.
On the other hand, it's completely unintuitive that "Sun Protection Factor 30 = 1/30th of UV light passes through it", and I had no idea there was any correlation before this comment.
The only intuitive bit about that system is "bigger number does more." I feel like I would have more readily understood it if it just said "blocks 97% (or 98%) of UV light" instead of numbers I assumed were somewhat arbitrary.
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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.
No, you've raised the efficacy from 98 to 99, which is not much of a change. What you have done is halved the inefficacy, which is a big change.
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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
Greatest thing I’ve learned today. Thank you.
Isn't 誘惑 more like “allure, temptation, seduction”?
My Japanese is very bad, but I think it would be translated back into english as 'the allure of 66%'
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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
Doesn't Aldi work against that theory?
Dunno. I stopped shopping at Aldi because we always needed to visit another store anyway, so for me that theory still holds. They've also taken cheap veggie chocolate milk out of the assortment, and the store next door introduced it, so there isn't any unique(ly cheap) product there that I can't get at the more expensive store and that's where we now do all our shopping. We only ever still visit Aldi when the Edeka, next door, is out of some product that Aldi has
In trying to find the exact figure earlier, I did see a paper where they classified people as one-, two-, or three-stop shoppers. Seems to be common, seeing as a lot of stores here are actually adjacent. You don't see that much in NL where I'm from. Anyway, I didn't end up finding back this figure and I don't know to which market this was supposed to apply; maybe in places like France the hypermarkets have everything without being expensive and it applies more to that? All results I found were about how amazing this company's loyalty cards are and you (the supermarket) should totally introduce them for better retention
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".
Part of the problem is The US Government (and UK Government) use the "2% rule" on their websites and only officially support 98%.
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://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.
Yeah, this is sort of the problem with a percentage-based approach. You are better with a "pick the top 3 implementations" in most cases - that bags you Webkit, Blink, and Gecko in the browser example, and since we're ignoring the long-tail in either case, that's probably good enough
If they drop support of Firefox, does that mean they would actively block Firefox?
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.
A lot of the time it's not software developers who define it and it's about the budget. Usually it's the product decision. E.g. an agency who has constant recurring experience with it might indicate that supporting N% browsers costs this much with cost increasing the higher the percentage. E.g. you want to use CSS flex you might get 97% to 99% of all World users, because there's going to be certain percentage for which it won't work. If you claim to support those old browsers you will need to test with them too and be able to easily spin up etc It's not just knowledge of what you can or can't use, it will be extra permutations of testing everything.
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I don't like treating people like numbers. 98% isn't much and it isn't little. It's just wrong.
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.
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...
There seem to be updated stats here: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart
Which seems to indicate about 4.8% are below Android 9.
But also, Firefox for Android still supports Android 8, of which there are 1.7% below.
There's a discussion to be made here about who is dropping support for these users, is it Google (and especially Apple, who doesn't allow other browsers on iOS) or the site owner? Especially given how insecure it is to use outdated browsers.
You're misinterpreting the stats. Those are not "updated" - they're from Dec 1, 2025 and are the latest that are available from Android Studio (I just checked again).
If you add up the distribution inclusive of Android 9 (which is what I was trying to refer to, perhaps unsuccessfully), it is 9.2%. That corresponds with the 90.7% Cumulative Distribution for Android 10
If you're arguing that it is Google who is dropping support/making people have insecure browsers, we're in agreement. As with Safari (or at least those at Apple who control/fund Safari), the Android team is very anti-Web/Chrome. Lots has been written about all of that at https://infrequently.org.
Also, since this article/post is about 98%, Android 7 and below account for 2% of usage still, and its max Chrome version is 124, which was released in April 2024.
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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.
Most common methodologies were already garbage even a few years ago, with general consensus being that Firefox was probably undercounted by at least 30%; and in more technical arenas, it can be a lot higher, perhaps up to 80%. (Unfortunately, that’s still probably not a lot.)
Even back then, Chrome was commonly being significantly overcounted due to user-agent string shenanigans. And these days I’m confident (without any figures, or even relevant recent commercial experience) that will have increased sharply. I expect that it is now massively overcounted, at the same time as Firefox is significantly undercounted.
Statcounter is particularly commonly used, and honestly one of the worst. Its mobile figures, for example, are completely useless because they don’t report browser versions. CanIUse figures (which lean heavily but not solely on Statcounter) are lousy and unrealistic due to some of these sorts of issues, and just generally being out of date. (I examined the matter closely on 2023-05-27 and the figures corresponded with being about six weeks behind.)
Also Firefox users are probably "power users" nowadays, which may or may not be relevant for various sites.
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.
I live my life a 1/4 of a percentile at a time ... For those ten seconds or less, I'm free.
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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.
If a fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”.
Close, but the other way round. Don't avoid a feature because it lacks good enough support. Write code to progressively enhance the experience if the feature is supported in the user's browser. If you're not willing to do that, then don't use the feature.
Progressive enhancement today means you can use pretty much any browser feature you want. You just have to do a bit of legwork with some @supports or JS prototype checking after doing the basic version first. It's not really much extra work.
This. Cannot believe it too so long for somebody to finally mention progressive enhancement.
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.
>Pragmatically, often users without new browsers and OSses are not the best clients
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 make enterprise software then, ya, target that.
If you're selling tickets to a venue, then your site is blocked by them anyway.
This article is a weird extremist take.
I’m a bit skeptical of the accuracy of the traffic data claimed in this article, 30% of users not being able to use baseline widely available features is a suspiciously large number. Unless this is a very unique set of users, I doubt that it is accurate. Maybe bot traffic messing up the data?
For context, baseline widely available requires that your browser have updated at some point in 2023, which happens automatically for almost all users. For mobile devices, any device that supports Android >= 7.0 or iOS >= 17 would meet this requirement. Chrome even supported Windows 7 through Feb 2023, too.
According to this: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/mobile-os-market-share-2...
* iOS >= 17.0 covers 95% of global active iOS devices
* Android >= 7.0 covers at least 99% of global active Android devices
It seems reasonable to me to drop support for Windows XP, IE, and phones that are a decade or more old (iPhone 8, Galaxy S5). And if you claim to be supporting stuff that old, but you don’t test your site on it, you’re just kidding yourself.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
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.)
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.
Public infrastructure is different. It should work for everyone. My argument is more about commercial products with profitability kept in mind.
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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.
People in wheelchairs literally need them to live, they have no alternative.
People who don't update browsers for years (or even decades) do so willingly.
That mirrors my experience using web pages to order things. They work ~70% of the time. Often while I sit there repeatedly pressing a 'buy' button that does nothing, or playing around with my browser's development tools to try and fix it client side, I wonder how often physical stores cash registers fail, in comparison. Just yesterday I tried to order from a site called buttonworks.com, but the order page only worked in Firefox, and the account/payment pages only worked in Chrome, and I gave up on trying to copy cookies from one browser to another and went with purebuttons.com.
Stripe payment somehow gets Firefox into an infinite loop for me. Have to kill the process and try again in Chrome.
When I had appendicitis seven years ago, I went to the emergency room, found out I would need surgery, and was (I think understandably) scared.
I texted a friend about that while I was waiting and he, trying to make me feel better, said something like "Dude, appendectomies are pretty routine, there's probably like a 99% survival rate" for them.
That that did not make me feel better. If I asked you to guess a number between 1 and 100, and you guessed corrected, I would only be a little impressed. 1 in 100 things happen all the time!
Obviously, I didn't die, and it worked out pretty routinely, but I always think about that particular situation when I hear about things being "98% successful".
> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
On the flipside, if a client enters enough venues that refuse entry to them because of something the client can fix on their end, eventually the client will probably change themselves -- "If you meet one asshole during your day" and all that.
To bring the analogy back to browsers, if a website works fine for a client, they'll have no pressure to change anything on their end -- why upgrade from Windows XP when the site looks fine in IE6? Eventually the client is forced to upgrade -- normally by their operating system. That works, but what if the operating system adds another 2 years to their end of life -- do you just hang on and hope the shim / hacks you added hold?
A website dedicated to promoting LASIK says the surgery “boasts a success rate of at least 96%”, and a satisfaction rate of 95%. “Long-term or chronic dry eye affects only a small minority (about 4%)” while cases requiring follow-up treatments are “typically under 5%”.
These numbers have never been particularly reassuring to me.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
That’s not actually possible with the example given in the article (dropping scss and moving to nested css), it’s all or nothing for many cases.
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.
https://caniuse.com/ciu/settings#usage
Haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure Google falls back on older browsers.
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.
WebP is especially hated for this among non-techies (31.8k upvotes, 1 month ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1trpuvr/...
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.
Serving a website is different than serving food or providing safety features. Web design can use progressive enhancement and detect available features to use as they are available.
With a website, you can have the "real" layout, but when someone is blocking your JS, you can fallback and still provide content.
We won't get every mobile application working on old browsers, but we can offer something to the end user. Even a page that lets them know they are missing out.
But CSS Nesting? We can have that and a fallback.
The problem is webdevs don't do that. They say "98% is fine" and then don't program any fallback, or worse, actively block users that don't meet 100% compatibility.
Probably because that extra 2% (or whatever figure) isn’t terrible valuable in the first place. Sometimes the best answer is “they’ll need to update their stuff”.
The whole premise of the article is fallacious analogies and mixed metaphors.
Yes a restaurant that poisons 2% of its customers is a bad restaurant. A restaurant that has nothing for people who are strict kosher, strict halal, strict vegan, or have severe multiple food allergies is not a bad restaurant. There may be 5% of people who simply can’t eat there because the kitchen cooks pork and there’s peanut shells on the ground but their idiosyncratic requirements don’t dictate the experience of the other 95%. Or 90%, or what have you.
I guarantee you, if your product is a mobile app, you're excluding more than 2% of the population.
This concept is missed so much in AI research and is quite frustrating.
Related: Science is a strong-link problem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712694
Things like lottery tickets are "strong link" problems (the system's value equals the strongest link's value); food safety is a "weak link" problem (the safety of a meal equals the least safe bite of food).
It appears that the author is advocating for "weak link" standards for CSS (it matters more what the vast majority see, knocking it out of the park once or twice won't make up for the failures)
If you think a browser feature that's been standard since 2023 is only supported by 70% of your visitors, you're wrong. The 30% of "users" that don't support it aren't visitors, they're bots pretending to be browsers. Bots update their user-agent strings less often than users update their browsers. My experience maintaining firewall rules is that "outdated version of an evergreen browser" is a pretty reliable bot signal: those UAs correlate strongly with all of the other bot indicators (inhumanly high request rates, datacenter IPs, loading pages without loading the page's associated resources, etc).
On the other hand, if you design something to include 100% of people, you will fail, and you will not give your core audience as good of an experience as they could have gotten.
So I like the opposite approach. If there's literally one guy on the planet, and this article/app/idea changes his life... what would that look like?
I enjoyed reading the acceptable food contamination levels relating to rodent feces, Insects, bone, set by the FDA.
Likewise anyone with anaphlaxis in themselves or family will be familiar with the risk equation of "may contain" distinct from simple food adulteration: May contain is probably safer than some random restaurant using "cumin" which has nuts in it as a cheap substitution up the supply chain with no declaration.
> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
The web has been doing this since, when, the 90's?
I use Firefox. In the last year, suddenly quite a few web sites have just stopped working on it for me. Firefox is over 2% market share.
That's old data? It's under 2% now.
The source I checked has it above 2%. I'm looking across all platforms (desktop, mobile, etc).
> 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.
98% isn't much, but it's also not little. It's just a number, and numbers don't have a meaning without an interpretation. That's a fundamental logical feature, but hardly a special insight.
Decisions are about tradeoffs. 2% of users staring at a broken screen is bad, of course. But what is the _cost_ of not using nested CSS? The responsible way to make a decision is to consider both sides of the tradeoff.
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.
Isn't this obvious?
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.
98% of any particular audience at a live event is well behaved. Unfortunately, in an audience of 1,000 people, that means 20 people are not well behaved, and if each of those 20 people ruins the event for their neighbors, that means at least 200 people had a bad time.
If 2% of your users complain and leave bad reviews, and only 1% leave good reviews...
They can't leave bad reviews if they cannot use your website ... 5D chess move.
> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
Actually this happens a lot more than you'd think. Every time renovations are done without consideration for wheelchair users, it's basically an improved experience that denies a percentage of people access
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
If that 30% of visitors with incompatible browsers has no overlap with the target audience you wish to reach, then what does it matter for your business?
Of course, you do not know this exactly, but the point is that it's easy to look at the wrong statistic and come to conclusions that are not necessarily useful in some context. The lens matters just as much as the percentage, if not more.
We shouldn't go out of our way to support IE11 anymore, sorry
In the early days of commercial optical-character-recognition software, vendors would brag about 99% accuracy.
But a single-spaced-typewritten page has about 500 words, so you were looking at five typos every single page. It was good at the time, but you still had to manually check every single word.
2% of country's people working together is a successful revolution
> 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.
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
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.
But is it? Addressing 98%of TAM, is?
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?
Software isn't the product though.
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.
I like stuff that takes a statistic that we view one way and explains how to see it another way
in this sense, related https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
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'.
Do you sell the t-shirt also? :)
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Best-Viewed-with-Interne...
The problem I encounter more frequently is: Advertised number is high %, then after considering all risks and terms and conditions it is sub average.
Relavent XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/325/
Hover text: You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.
When you work on high availability, mission critical systems, 99.99% uptime is unacceptable. That’s a full hour of downtime in a calendar year.
Space Shuttle missions returned their crew alive 98.5% of the time.
I wonder how much traffic from bots is skewing OPs nested CSS calculations
Huh, good point. I have a shocking number of visitors saying they use IE 7 on Mac OS 9 on Intel.
Wasn't there something in statistics to describe something like this? i.e. gaussian distributions vs something that's modeled on sparse occurrences, etc?
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.
The author is confusing visitors with customers. Refusing entry to 2% visitors? No, no! Forgetting about non-interesting 2% visitors? Not even a blink!
This applies to AI too.
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.
What a useless observation. "Metrics are different when applied to different things."
I thought this was gonna be about uptime.
Well I wasn't very far off I guess! Perhaps "5 nines" is a good threshold for new CSS features too?
> Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases.
How do you justify this when you factor in cost and time?
What’s much and what isn’t depends on the context. One hair on your head isn’t much but one hair in your soup is.
Great point, but if the 2% are served graceful degradation rather than a broken site, that's probably okay.
2/100 isn't little.
Log odds ratios are less misleading. Or at least odds ratios.
> 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 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.
Probabilities are hard for humans, probably.
Alternatively getting the last piece of 1% could mean 99% of the effort. Would you consider it fruitful to chase 100%?
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.
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.
1% failure rate of a hundred might be acceptable. 1% failure rate of a million is not.
Isn't that a named law?
It's just mathematical expectation.
Don't look at the simple probability - look at probability * value.
aka expectation
Yes. That's why I said "expectation".
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.
Supermarkets often have so low margin that building for the 98% of customers means that all of the profit has disappeared.
Profit is often at the margin.
Some people are locked in old devices and can't upgrade. Basically you are doing class discrimination...
Which is perfectly fine for businesses. If I sell $10,000 suits then I don't care about people buying $5 undergarments.
Their inability to stay current does not constitute a responsibility for all of us to halt progress.
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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".
Using a 3 year old browser eh?, let me dig up a link for you to click.
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.
I get that some companies mandate IE11, they may have IE-first internal sites, custom browser plugins, MDM configs - actual systems that would need to be updated. And MS still supports it and releases security patches for it.
But being forced to use ancient Chrome/Edge versions? You are exposing your users to half a dozen sandbox escapes, and there's no big blocker from upgrading. Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?
> I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9
It's been 15 years since IE9. Where do you draw the line?
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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?
My development comfort is worth more than the service for users with vastly outdated browser.
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Agreed - there’s a point where supporting old out of date browsers is simply an enabler.
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'm fine if you want to hand over 98% of wealth in the world, its a lot for me
If a plane did not crash 98% of the time, you wouldn't step on it.
Feels like it's 2006 again and we're talking about IE vs Firefox.
Some things are measured from 0, some are measured from 100. Depending on Expectation.
When expectation is 100%, telling me 98% success rate isn't enough. An example where the argument happens on Reddit, Macrumours and even on HN. When Apple's butterfly keyboard have issues. Apple Supporter was quick to dismiss the issue and point out the double entry is such a small issue because it is working 99.9% of the time. What they don't realise keyboard before that was practically 100%. That 0.1% error rate is infinitely more than 0%.
Another example is Internet connection When you are used to perfect Internet connection, just a small beep in disconnecting turns to be major annoyance. There are plenty of these examples especially with DOCSIS Cable modem. The modem theoretically is working 99,95% of the time, hence cable companies won't fix it. But Disconnecting 10 to 30 seconds every day is annoying enough.
I am not sure if there is a word or terminology for it so this could be better explained to people.
On the other hand, there are plenty of things where 80% is good enough, or doing above and beyond at 96% by getting 80% out of the original remaining 20%.
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.
I used to try to make the point with non-tech people using the salesman analogy: If you were a salesperson who worked inbound calls from potential customers, would you be willing to handle 1 out of every 50 calls by picking up the phone, yelling "fuck you" into it, and hanging up? That's pretty much what you're doing to your customers when your software works for 98% of them.
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.
> Just tell the AI to do it
This is the new Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
Good luck bro.
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.
"Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context" is exactly what the article was saying....
I am not exactly sure what is the article trying to point out
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
Jesse, we need to refactor the edge cases Jesse
If it's uptime it's definitively not much!
this made me lol
Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?
Sure, it's called a 'dress code'.
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.
And I see the opposite: Safari is a valuable check on constant additions and bloat to the web platform.
The author seems to equivocate by comparing completely different domains.
Whether 98% is acceptable, it depends on the cost of failure, not the percentage itself.
"Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases"
Not really. Truly robust engineering includes a cost-benefit analysis of which edge cases you handle. We don't live in a world of unlimited time & money.
60% of the time, it works every time
Design bloggers are about to reinvent the concept of availability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...
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.
Reading the comments, I expected this blog post to be about something fundamental. But nope. It's just about native CSS nesting. A convenience feature that merely adopts functionality that preprocessors have long provided. Maybe I'm alone in this viewport, but this isn't even worth debating unless you, the developer, are the priority.
It reminds me of when people argued against covid restrictions saying that the virus had a 99% survival rate. A disease with a 1% infection fatality rate is a terrible disease!
Full disclosure: I also argued against covid restrictions, but not with this terrible argument.
I mean 2% have their javascript turned off (either on purpose or caused by failing extensions). 5% are behind corporate proxies that block your domain. Are you going to host the site on substack also so those 5% can access it?
Off topic (and at risk of being downvoted), I don't think I'll ever get a better chance to insist here that
"99 and a half won't do"
https://youtu.be/1QVJCjbgM-s
Holy Disciples
Trying to Make a Hundred
Thank you :)
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...
This is a basic ontological error, author conflates reliability and suitability
>> If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population
>> If an employer pays their employees 98% of the times, I definitely wouldn’t want to work there
Are you sure about that? 2% of the population has no bank account, will your employer agree to pay in cash?
These are different scenarios -> your employer likely cannot pay some percentage of the population; but that’s not the same as the process randomly failing (which may be worse or better depending in some cases)
Or, phrased another way: there's a reason why we consider basic availability in nines and 2 nines is still considered pretty bad. 99% uptime means being down over 7 hours each month.
When I read the title, I instantly thought about these crappy Ai api status pages. People somehow are forced to accept that 98% uptime is alright.
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.
Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream. Website visitors can upgrade their browser.
>Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream.
Only temporarily. Some never mRNAed their bloodstream, then everyone with brain fog forgot about the Trump vaccine and the new normal went back to normal.
It depends on your requirements. The term that should have been mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
You can make it so those 2% are dealing with ugly -but functional- layouts
it that reduces development/maintenance cost by a lot, that's not a terrible deal.
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.
I couldn't agree more. BTW, 98% of US users have JavaScript enabled in 2025.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/No-JavaScript_notes
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.
Depends on the context
I thought this would be about AI slop.
Weird rant, unless they meant it as a anti-corporate screed against how openly hostile US technology has become to western democracies. Definitely didn't read as that way.
It feels as if OP independently invented the concept of six sigma.
Six sigma is a bit cultish, but overall the concept is quite clear - quality.
98% in a restaurant is horrible, because restaurants usually issue more than 100 meals per day. So 2% rate would mean a problem every day.
Although usually the distribution here would be different 98 good days and 2 bad where hundreds get food posioning..
>> 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.
I suppose in most industries, but in others a bug in a computer programming has more serious consequences.
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
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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.