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.
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.
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
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.
Meanwhile in Britain in the 1960s, this cost-cutting closure of local rail lines did happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts ... at a time when the trains and rail infrastructure had been publicly owned for about 15 years already. It doesn't dispel the incentive.
I have never heard the name Beeching spoken with more venom than in Wales, I used to live in Mid Wales and now I live in Cardiff. If I wanted to visit where I used to live by train, I'd have to do a multi-hour detour of a sightseeing trip around the West Midlands, deep into England. The Beeching Axe literally cut Wales in half and the consequences are felt to this day, even though there wasn't much outright salting the Earth to make sure the terrible decision couldn't be reversed as there was in some cases, the Welsh government doesn't have the money to reinstate the Aberystwyth-Carmarthen line which would deal with a lot of these north-south issues.
Also it's not just Wales where Beeching carried out intense vandalism of public infrastructure, the South West was severely affected too. Basically anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power. The general assumption was that private cars would replace the local trains, which as someone who currently doesn't drive for medical reasons really makes my blood boil. While perhaps not in intent, in effect the Beeching Axe was a profound kick in the teeth for the disabled.
Rural cities? Come again? What was demolished remained demolished, yes. Unclear on your point.
Oh I see (thanks to that edit). I mean, I agree with you. This is just the additional amusing detail that government-run services are still subject to a sort of dulled and homogenous version of market forces, which can be worse for small local concerns because it's less responsive. Though, admittedly, a giant corporation can simulate government very well, and can be just as crap.
>In the airline industry big airlines don’t go everywhere for this reasons but small local airlines fill the gap due to market opportunity.
You’re not wrong, but small and rural airports would not be able to maintain even these routes without EAS (essential air services) subsidies
You cut off the OP's sentence of that being examples for "Rail companies" and then added your own examples. Please be better at comprehesion and editing comments
"In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US." You know they use the Postal Service for last miles often? And the Postal Service is required by law to service far-flung places. So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
> then added your own examples. Please be better at comprehesion and editing comments
Did you miss the part where the conversation was about Ticketmaster and rails were used as an analogy for understanding the problem?
> So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
I don’t think that’s true as I can buy many things on Amazon which cannot be shipped via USPS.
Yes, we need to update what is considered essential infrastructure in the digital age.
Yea, when this topic comes up on HN, a lot of the usual excuses appear: It's hard to write software that works everywhere! It takes too long to test on more than one browser! It's too expensive to hire someone to port to X platform! We're trying to bootstrap in a hurry--there's no time to support Y people! Everybody should just upgrade to the latest, why should we test on older systems?
These are attitudes come from the privilege of never having been in that 2% of users, and I think we have them until that one day we end up being in that 2% and can't use the system ourselves.
When I wrote iOS apps, I was constantly infuriated by the tech lead's and product management's insistence to only support the current major OS version and the previous one. Engineers would take time out of their day to rip out support for iOS X-2 (rather than fixing bugs, working on performance or features)! Code that wasn't in the way of refactors, wasn't really buggy, wasn't harming anything architecturally. To me, it just looked like Griefing The User. I didn't get it and I still don't. Now, I have a 8 year old phone, and lo and behold, half of the apps in the AppStore don't even work on it anymore because of this attitude, so I guess I'm firmly in the 2%.
I think when you say “profit motivated” the underlying principle is actually utilitarianism; doing the most good for the most people, for which profit Is merely an imperfect proxy.
This might be a cynical take, but I doubt Ticketmaster (and most of these other examples) are motivated by doing the most good. Their underlying principle is extracting the most value for shareholders at any cost.
Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.
There is a limited amount of engineering resources. Don’t you agree they should try to use them for the benefit of the most people? That’s not to say they should exclude groups. But a small minority path probably gets less work than a main path. Would you agree these prudent or not?
The broader point is that percentages can be misleading, and are often because of that. It makes things sound better. But usually, the more accurate thing to do is use odds-notation ("1 in 50" instead of 98%). Percentages have a kind of singularity at the edges, where small numerical changes have massive real effects. Going from a success rate of 98% to 99% doesn't sound like much, but that's failing 1 in 50 vs 1 in 100. You've doubled the efficacy.
Isn't this pretty much the entire point of the article.
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%'
There are many ways to translate it "66% Seduction", "66%'ll do" etc. But debating the translation misses 66% of the point that it's just a fun fact ;)
I appreciate them! Keep at it :)
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
> 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?
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.
Also Firefox users are probably "power users" nowadays, which may or may not be relevant for various sites.
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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603
https://analytics.usa.gov/ says "There were 1.66 billion sessions in the last 30 days." - so 2% is 33 million sessions if I did my math right.
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
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.
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.
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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There's likely always a line somewhere where effort becomes way out of proportion compared to getting that last mile effort.
Arguably, if you only have a website, that won't work for anyone without access to the Internet. So then you should have a physical presence in each of those people's location, and arguably you shouldn't provide any improvements that give me more than physical presence does, so you should not have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office.
If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it.
And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.
Not using bleeding edge web "standards" is also hardly comparable to the office of having a physical presence in every locale though. Software developers seem to be uniquely good ad overvaluing small convenience gains for themselves compared to the pain inflicted by breaking compatibility multiplied by the set of affected users.
Most websites are glorified rich text or forms. And most of the rest should be that. This is even more true for the kinds of websites people need to use rather than some designers art experiments. They don't actually need all these fancy features except to make their developer's work slightly easier.
The other thing to keep in mind is that if you have a policy of considering 98% to be "close enough", then it only takes 35 of those decisions to remove over half the population. And it'll be exceptionally difficult to work your way back up, because each improvement will be minimal!
(Of course, this assumes that each decision is independent, which, when you're talking about browser support for CSS, is certainly not the case.)
The close-to-home example that came to my mind while reading this is GPU programming, where the percentage multiplies. Maybe there are other similar examples where a large sounding percent needs an exponent and shrinks?
With CUDA you try to keep all threads doing the same thing. Sometimes that’s very difficult, but if each thread does the same thing 98% of the time, is that enough? Well since there are warps of 32 connected threads, you might expect the probability that any thread in the warp diverges to be .98^32, or 50% of the time spent with one thread in the diverged code. 50% still doesn’t sound that bad unless threads diverge at different times, and then 50% warp divergence might mean a 16x slowdown overall. 98% isn’t enough in this case.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
It's really easy to serve fallback images to browsers that don't support AVIF, either client-side using the <picture> tag or server-side via the Accept header. Which mostly eliminates the concern from the article, since you don't have to drop support for any customers.
It kind of makes me wonder if anyone has made a build system / framework that serves nested CSS to modern browsers, and falls back to a preprocessed CSS file that removes all the nesting for older browsers.
For anyone who didn't know, caniuse lets you upload your actual usage data. Then for any capability, next to global support you also see the stats for your user-base.
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/...
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
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?
This concept is missed so much in AI research and is quite frustrating.
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.
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.
Public infrastructure is different. It should work for everyone. My argument is more about commercial products with profitability kept in mind.
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 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.
If a plane did not crash 98% of the time, you wouldn't step on it.
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.
> 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.
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/
The author is confusing visitors with customers. Refusing entry to 2% visitors? No, no! Forgetting about non-interesting 2% visitors? Not even a blink!
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.
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%.
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?
Wasn't there something in statistics to describe something like this? i.e. gaussian distributions vs something that's modeled on sparse occurrences, etc?
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.
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.
Jesse, we need to refactor the edge cases Jesse
I guarantee you, if your product is a mobile app, you're excluding more than 2% of the population.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Great point, but if the 2% are served graceful degradation rather than a broken site, that's probably okay.
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...
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.
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.
Space Shuttle missions returned their crew alive 98.5% of the time.
We shouldn't go out of our way to support IE11 anymore, sorry
Feels like it's 2006 again and we're talking about IE vs Firefox.
> 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
> 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?
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 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
Relavent XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/325/
Hover text: You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.
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'm fine if you want to hand over 98% of wealth in the world, its a lot for me
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.
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".
1% failure rate of a hundred might be acceptable. 1% failure rate of a million is not.
Isn't that a named law?
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.
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 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 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.
Progress, or constant churn for the sake of Google's stranglehold on web standards?
Well this is another story.
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?
Depends on the revenue they bring vs the cost of serving them. It's highly dependent on market/business/company.
Often you simply don't offer the feature. E.g 3d rendered previews may not be available but product configuration and cart keeps working on a shop selling custom showers (you fallback to dynamic static images).
In real estate a page displaying fancy maps with price statistics by area/neighborhood might be unavailable, but the core business of listings and search does.
The people that work there are the customer, not the company itself.
And they mostly check your website when they are bored at work. Not when they leave it and have kids, hobbies or a household to care for.
In travel sector users predominantly navigate in office hours from their work devices. You go meet them where they are. 4% of 6 million daily users is 240'000 potential customers. Converting 3% of them means millions at the end of the year.
Maybe some like airbnb have (or at least used to have) a unique catalogue and they can play a different game and afford to lose some money.
Most e-commerces play differently, at different scales and enjoy different moats and different shareholders/owners expectations.
Why? There are no features which aren't supported by 10 year old browsers which can bring more sales or improve the user experience. So who are these new features good for?
My development comfort is worth more than the service for users with vastly outdated browser.
That spells lost sales if you're doing it as a job. Or at least lack of access for people with older devices if you're doing it as a hobby. Then it's of course your call.
Agreed - there’s a point where supporting old out of date browsers is simply an enabler.
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 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.
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
If it's uptime it's definitively not much!
this made me lol
60% of the time, it works every time
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.
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.
Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream. Website visitors can upgrade their browser.
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...
It depends on your requirements. The term that should have been mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
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.
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"
Holy Disciples
Trying to Make a Hundred
Thank you :)
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.
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.
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.
>> 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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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.
man, HN is awesome
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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.
Yeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking.
Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes.
Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue.
His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website.
Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.
Except there was 0 analysis of the cost/benefit of supporting the end of the long tail, instead it was just economics-free shaming. Of course, you want to see who those 2% of users actually are. But nowhere in this article did I find any advice I'd actually want to use in a really business scenario.
I mean the name was "98% isn't much" and the article made it sound like 98% isn't good enough
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.
This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.
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.
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.
Seems like you’re getting hate but this is how the world works. Uber just has to support the devices that their market uses. And especially for visas the government is free to make the public bend to whatever arbitrary requirements they develop for using their byzantine systems.
You you can make a law that requires such businesses to use perfectly good technology standards that are widely supported instead of whatever EEE crap the latest Chrome comes with.
I remember years ago when websites would have buttons "best viewed in Internet explorer 4.0". We're past those days, but only because it's implied "use chrome, maybe webkit, we didn't test on Firefox"
Ideally we could section off some minimal baseline functionality that could be implemented more securely than the whole modern stack. Just HTML and a little CSS or something. Then mandate that, at least, services provided by the state should be accessible in this baseline functionality mode.
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.
Most managers I've had preached the "80/20" rule, so 80% was good enough.
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.
There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers.
There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason.
These people just use the sites that work. They aren't computer experts, and might not even realise why half the internet doesn't work - they just think that's the way things are.
While I agree with your general gist and definitely your final paragraph,
> There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers.
How many people have 10 year old phones? I've got an 8 year old iPhone XR which I keep around as a backup/travel device because it's not worth selling, and the battery is… not happy even in airplane mode.
For me to have a 10 year old mobile browser, I'd have to have kept the iPhone SE 1 (or was it a 5c?) that I bought second hand in 2018, and not upgraded it since I bought it. I got rid of it because the battery wouldn't hold a charge for 10 minutes.
I've a Xiaomi Mi 6 phone (2017 model) that I still use as a fridge-mounted shopping list and it's using the latest version of Chrome. I think it would be quite the stretch to find a user using a 10 year old browser.
I am an expert and half the internet does not work. That's just the way things are
It's fine to support such configurations by accident, but you shouldn't try to support them intentionally. You will end up dropping support eventually regardless but the skeletons will live on in your codebase as tech debt.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
You get the guy at the mall to swap in a new battery for $50 in most parts of the world. Its cheaper to do that every few years than buy a new phone, and I have several family members who refuse to upgrade on principle, because modern phones grew too large for their hands/pockets
I support a bevy of older people with older computers, senior-citizen types. Upgrades are expensive. Monetarily, but also in retraining. These folks don't want the latest UI, they want what is familiar, and retraining is super annoying.
Computers that were EOL a few years ago, running ten-year-old browsers, are absolutely routine.
That's a choice by the people who make websites and browsers that forces the average person to buy a new computer. If we all cared about letting people use old computers, this wouldn't be the case.
Right. That problem is bloat, not lack of legacy support. Adding (already bloated) legacy support to already bloated software just makes bloat worse.
There’s also being poor, or working for an organization that’s poor. In both cases the obsolete(?) software might be various degrees of intentional, but the alternative is usually worse anyway.
I doubt that for the hackernews audience that the age of the browsers is an issue. I would say in practice that 90% is nowhere near what is achieved - that it's closer to 90% and amongst the hackernews audience probably lucky if it gets to 50% because of our use of anti-tracking and ad blockers.
Respectfully, you may live in a bubble of fairly tech-savvy folks. Most of my extended family run 10+ year old laptops as their daily drivers. Their phones are often on the second or third battery replacement. They don't install updates very often (if at all). For the most part they are still more proficient with tech than many of their peers.
Or use a smart TV (most apps on TVs are web apps. Enjoy: https://developer.samsung.com/smarttv/develop/specifications...
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.
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).
A lesson taught to millions of businesses by GroupOn.
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.
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.
Expect is not what I do but I fight for it.
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.