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” https://www.discogs.com/release/8303076
There are many ways to translate it "66% Seduction", "66%'ll do" etc. But debating the translation misses 66% of the point that it's just a fun fact ;)
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.
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.
Why? There are no features which aren't supported by 10 year old browsers which can bring more sales or improve the user experience. So who are these new features good for?
That spells lost sales if you're doing it as a job. Or at least lack of access for people with older devices if you're doing it as a hobby. Then it's of course your call.
This 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 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".
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.
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.
Many users are B2B2C retailers in machinery or carpentry using the same computer they bought 20 years ago and they need to provide a quote to the customer in front of them. Single orders can easily be 5 figures.
Losing up to 5% of office hours traffic, made of good income - stable job individuals when you're serving millions of users or strong retailers unbothered by tech updates is the difference between good margins and no margins at all.
But of course in an industry writing vomit-worthy React/Tailwind soups because billion dollar companies filled with MIT-bred leetcode ninjas completely devoid of engineering skills do so, such nuance about the "real world" is hard to find.
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?
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
Respectfully: To me these just sound like excuses.
I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you deliberately choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? 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.
The inherent property of software is that the only way to be sure your software works on a particular platform is to test on that platform.
There is not a baseline target subset of HTML/CSS that reaches 100% coverage that can be statically verified. HTML tables usually work in old browsers, but there were subtle bugs in old versions of Internet Explorer, bugs that you're especially likely to hit if you're using tables for layout (because you can't use modern CSS layout features). The only way to be sure that you didn't trigger one of those subtle bugs is to test your web app on ancient browsers.
The cost of reaching the last 0.N% of users rises with each platform you add to your test matrix. It costs money to test your web app on Internet Explorer. It costs even more money to fix bugs that only affect Internet Explorer.
I think you can't deny that doing that work is expensive. The question then has to be whether that work will repay itself somehow. But the last 0.N% of users will only provide ~0.N% increases to your revenue. Unless your revenue is astronomical, you can't afford even one full-time engineer to test and fix bugs on 0.N% of browsers.
But again you're flattening all browser compatibility into ancient browsers that 10 people use and saying closing the end of that gap is far too difficult to justify the time and expense required, but what exactly are we talking about there? What broke? Can people on IE6 get the majority of the content but the subscription popup is broken, or does the page fail to render entirely and leave them completely high and dry?
It's impossible for me to engage with this thought experiment without thinking of hundreds, perhaps thousands of sites I've been to (their provider rhymes with Rare Mace) where literally nothing works without JavaScript, and I don't mean animations are broken or images look funny, I mean the website is a white fucking screen because literally everything is loaded in via esoteric new JS frameworks which aren't firing because the engine choked on an analytics package and died before it even got that far, and that site is showing...
... text. Formatted text. With perhaps some pictures. And animations nobody outside of marketing cares about.
So like, is your site broken because it's legitimately cutting edge shit, doing difficult work, and providing an answer to a complex user problem? Okay cool, IE6 support is probably not a high priority, I agree. Or, is it an utterly run-of-the-mill ad for your company's services, that was made incorrectly by people who don't know what they're doing, and/or have overengineered it beyond recognition of the actual problem it was trying to solve? If it's that one, then put your shiny toys down, rebuilt it simply and with regular tooling, and THEN see how your IE6 compatibility is doing.
I'll tell you this much: I've NEVER tested for IE6 on my personal website. I just did. Navigation is a bit wonky and my blur filter effects are broken, obviously. But you can still read my posts and navigate about.
At what point is a good point to call it a day though?
Unless I am very specifically being paid for it, which I would love to be and I would enjoy doing because I love CSS, there are features that would rather make my experience, and the experience of the entire site better over the course of a decade+, such as nesting. Nesting has changed everything about CSS for me with project organization that makes changes significantly easier, AND significantly easier to pass off to another person. Now that it's at about 90% browser compatability[0] I actively use it in every single project I can, but it's still not supported if you haven't updated your browser in 3 years or use a random oneoff browser that may come with your knockoff smartphone.
It is an excuse, but it's also an honest question. Granted, not all projects are created equal, some of them are for people looking for bleeding edge technology, where it makes sense they would have their browsers updated. Some are government websites that should be accessible to 100% of everybody even if they're looking at your page on a 14 year old psp.
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.
Maybe, or maybe there is no yacht and no 2 star restaurant. Since your profile doesn't have any personal info (which is certainly your right, mind) I have only one data point and it tilts towards the latter.
It has a full name and personal website link in one of the comments, which contains a link to their food photography page saying that cooking used to be their profession.
I would assume that should be enough to at least believe it in the absence of evidence showing otherwise, but I guess we aren't treating replies in good faith anymore here.
Yeah, it's just one person here, but I am starting to see that type of a person across all HN comment sections way more often these days.
Nothing personal against that specific user at all btw, especially since they recognized it.
It was just more of a personal rant on my part, as I am saddened by slow redditification of HN comments over the years. Higher-trust comment sections is a major part of why I've been enjoying HN for so long, as opposed to many other alternatives.
We know from email leaks that billionaires' spelling ability is worse than Roblox players. Don't see why their chef would need to have perfect spelling
> 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.
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/boat as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which may never get fixed.
(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. For websites, this means you should test reasonably well on all browsers your users use and put risky code in try/catch blocks.
(3) 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.
(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a different argument than the article.
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.
I would make the argument that people would have to weigh the cost of being accessible to the last 2% vs the cost of losing the last 2%.
Anyone who deliver mail to rural farmers 100 years ago would lose money. There are 3 options. 1. If farmers want mail, they can pay the extra. 2. Force by law, mail carriers to deliver at a loss to farmers. 3. Rural Free Delivery, the government taxes everyone and pays for the free deliver to farmers.
Although almost all farmers in the United States and a majority of users on Hacker News would disagree with me, the answer is the government should continue to deliver free mail to rural farmers. The collective benefit outweighs the cost.
Based on the results of US elections in the past 30 years, farmers (as represented by rural voters in general) do not vote for candidates who support "collective benefit."
Sure they do they create co-operatives and pool resources together. They created banks, insurance that serve their needs. Farmers aren't some lone wolf. Farmers created universal health care in other countries like Canada.
They don't support the left and social politics of pushing trans, gay, racial, feminist policies. They believe in God and Christian values.
They work hard and expect others to and don't support a welfare state but that's different from collective benefits.
Yes, they've been told to fear "gay policies", whatever that actually means. Judging by the results, it's fair to say they are by and large uneducated -- except in their very narrow domain.
I agree to the extent that this is about tradeoffs, hence my last paragraph about “moving the slider”.
USPS makes people who live too far off their normal routes (and presumably the homeless) use PO Boxes to receive their deliveries. That seems equivalent to the website owner using “graceful degradation” for those website features that 2% of browser users can’t use. The article is about website owners who don’t know or bother to use graceful degradation.
Yes, obviously each website owner has to make their own choices about cost/benefit. Except in practice, each product manager doesn’t actually know the cost or benefit of each feature they choose to use which doesn’t have 100% browser compatibility. It’s worth the occasional discussion to highlight these issues, hence the article.
Also, FWIW I couldn’t get delivery to my residence when I lived in a ski resort town. I was forced to use a PO Box, which put the burden of the last mile on the user and took that burden off of the postal service. I’m guessing lots of farmers who don’t live on main roads/routes have to similarly use PO Boxes.
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.
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 affect, 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 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.
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.
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 to support a feature set that old?
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.
In my experience usually it's the software developers trying to push blame onto other people. Sometimes it's a total rewrite or a new product and you actually have to ask how far back to bother supporting (devs are still the ones who ask this). But most times when support is dropped from an existing product it's because a dev brought the question up first.
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'.
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.
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.
“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.
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%.
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.
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.
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I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
Designing for the ideal (or for the <98%) is fine. As long as the experience is gracefully degraded for the rest.
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".
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.
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.
Many users are B2B2C retailers in machinery or carpentry using the same computer they bought 20 years ago and they need to provide a quote to the customer in front of them. Single orders can easily be 5 figures.
Losing up to 5% of office hours traffic, made of good income - stable job individuals when you're serving millions of users or strong retailers unbothered by tech updates is the difference between good margins and no margins at all.
But of course in an industry writing vomit-worthy React/Tailwind soups because billion dollar companies filled with MIT-bred leetcode ninjas completely devoid of engineering skills do so, such nuance about the "real world" is hard to find.
It's been 15 years since IE9. Where do you draw the line?
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?
Hmm, it could be fat enterprise clients with locked-down software versions (legacy, security etc.) That's where most of the money is, isn't it?
If you're selling tickets to a venue, then your site is blocked by them anyway.
This article is a weird extremist take.
Whether 98% is acceptable, it depends on the cost of failure, not the percentage itself.
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.
How do you justify this when you factor in cost and time?
I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboard panes load normally (so a dashboard with 20 panes is broken in nearly 1 in 5 loads), and so on. If your LLM gets 99% of tool calls right, nearly every session will contain a malformed tool call.
Probabilities are hard for humans, probably.
This 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.
Don't look at the simple probability - look at probability * value.
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.
If your web app crashes one out of every fifty times I launch it, it's not good. The business side of things is reasonable to prioritize right up until it isn't.
If you're using a different, random browser every time you access our web app, you're in a minority far smaller than 2%. Or you've shared your account with 50 friends, and we'd prefer that you do that with someone else's app anyway.
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.
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.
Anyone who has ever done website or mobile development knows there is a huge array of browsers and platforms, and supporting the very long tail of configurations is sometimes nearly impossible, let alone almost never cost effective. When I last ran some web apps, we'd see substantial numbers of errors just due to f'd up (or sometimes outright malicious) browser plugins. I'm not checking every random configuration of browser plugins against my website to ensure they all work.
Like you say, it really depends, which is why I hate blanket directives like the article gave. If suddenly 2% of people couldn't log into gmail, that would be a huge deal affecting 10s of millions of people. As the adage goes, "You're not Google", and for a lot of small e-commerce websites trying to fix someone on some decade+ old browser just doesn't make sense (and, as another comment mentioned, these users are often the least likely to convert in any case).
I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you deliberately choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? 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.
There is not a baseline target subset of HTML/CSS that reaches 100% coverage that can be statically verified. HTML tables usually work in old browsers, but there were subtle bugs in old versions of Internet Explorer, bugs that you're especially likely to hit if you're using tables for layout (because you can't use modern CSS layout features). The only way to be sure that you didn't trigger one of those subtle bugs is to test your web app on ancient browsers.
The cost of reaching the last 0.N% of users rises with each platform you add to your test matrix. It costs money to test your web app on Internet Explorer. It costs even more money to fix bugs that only affect Internet Explorer.
I think you can't deny that doing that work is expensive. The question then has to be whether that work will repay itself somehow. But the last 0.N% of users will only provide ~0.N% increases to your revenue. Unless your revenue is astronomical, you can't afford even one full-time engineer to test and fix bugs on 0.N% of browsers.
It's impossible for me to engage with this thought experiment without thinking of hundreds, perhaps thousands of sites I've been to (their provider rhymes with Rare Mace) where literally nothing works without JavaScript, and I don't mean animations are broken or images look funny, I mean the website is a white fucking screen because literally everything is loaded in via esoteric new JS frameworks which aren't firing because the engine choked on an analytics package and died before it even got that far, and that site is showing...
... text. Formatted text. With perhaps some pictures. And animations nobody outside of marketing cares about.
So like, is your site broken because it's legitimately cutting edge shit, doing difficult work, and providing an answer to a complex user problem? Okay cool, IE6 support is probably not a high priority, I agree. Or, is it an utterly run-of-the-mill ad for your company's services, that was made incorrectly by people who don't know what they're doing, and/or have overengineered it beyond recognition of the actual problem it was trying to solve? If it's that one, then put your shiny toys down, rebuilt it simply and with regular tooling, and THEN see how your IE6 compatibility is doing.
I'll tell you this much: I've NEVER tested for IE6 on my personal website. I just did. Navigation is a bit wonky and my blur filter effects are broken, obviously. But you can still read my posts and navigate about.
Unless I am very specifically being paid for it, which I would love to be and I would enjoy doing because I love CSS, there are features that would rather make my experience, and the experience of the entire site better over the course of a decade+, such as nesting. Nesting has changed everything about CSS for me with project organization that makes changes significantly easier, AND significantly easier to pass off to another person. Now that it's at about 90% browser compatability[0] I actively use it in every single project I can, but it's still not supported if you haven't updated your browser in 3 years or use a random oneoff browser that may come with your knockoff smartphone.
It is an excuse, but it's also an honest question. Granted, not all projects are created equal, some of them are for people looking for bleeding edge technology, where it makes sense they would have their browsers updated. Some are government websites that should be accessible to 100% of everybody even if they're looking at your page on a 14 year old psp.
[0] https://caniuse.com/css-nesting
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.
I would assume that should be enough to at least believe it in the absence of evidence showing otherwise, but I guess we aren't treating replies in good faith anymore here.
Nothing personal against that specific user at all btw, especially since they recognized it.
It was just more of a personal rant on my part, as I am saddened by slow redditification of HN comments over the years. Higher-trust comment sections is a major part of why I've been enjoying HN for so long, as opposed to many other alternatives.
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.
Both fields combine creativity with technical know how. It wouldn't surprise me if there were loads of wood and metal workers here too.
(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/boat as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which may never get fixed.
(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. For websites, this means you should test reasonably well on all browsers your users use and put risky code in try/catch blocks.
(3) 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.
(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a different argument than the article.
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.
Anyone who deliver mail to rural farmers 100 years ago would lose money. There are 3 options. 1. If farmers want mail, they can pay the extra. 2. Force by law, mail carriers to deliver at a loss to farmers. 3. Rural Free Delivery, the government taxes everyone and pays for the free deliver to farmers.
Although almost all farmers in the United States and a majority of users on Hacker News would disagree with me, the answer is the government should continue to deliver free mail to rural farmers. The collective benefit outweighs the cost.
They don't support the left and social politics of pushing trans, gay, racial, feminist policies. They believe in God and Christian values.
They work hard and expect others to and don't support a welfare state but that's different from collective benefits.
USPS makes people who live too far off their normal routes (and presumably the homeless) use PO Boxes to receive their deliveries. That seems equivalent to the website owner using “graceful degradation” for those website features that 2% of browser users can’t use. The article is about website owners who don’t know or bother to use graceful degradation.
Yes, obviously each website owner has to make their own choices about cost/benefit. Except in practice, each product manager doesn’t actually know the cost or benefit of each feature they choose to use which doesn’t have 100% browser compatibility. It’s worth the occasional discussion to highlight these issues, hence the article.
Furthermore, even if your site functionality has no 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.
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.
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.
Arguably, if you only have a website, that won't work for anyone without access to the Internet. So then you should have a physical presence in each of those people's location, and arguably you shouldn't provide any improvements that give me more than physical presence does, so you should not have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office.
If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it.
And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.
Most websites are glorified rich text or forms. And most of the rest should be that. This is even more true for the kinds of websites people need to use rather than some designers art experiments. They don't actually need all these fancy features except to make their developer's work slightly easier.
In 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.
I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver a code to my number. I tried a few numbers from our household and they all failed.
Searching for this issue yielded a bunch of results, so it was definitely a known issue, but there wasn't anything I could do, really. To them, it's simple math. Another SMS provider that covers my (tiny EU) country might be more expensive. They might be avoiding scammers that used my mobile operator in the past. Whatever it is, it would probably cost them more than they lose in ticket sales.
Without some government entity to force them, they don't give a shit about me being able to see an event.
There is a point where technology becomes foundational for participating in society. And then it needs to be regulated to be available to everyone.
Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.
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%.
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 think either you argue for regulation, or you argue more honestly: asserting that the extra cost will likely never directly pay for itself, but it is some of the secret sauce that can a good product into a great one.
Look at statistics of things like apple vs android users and their purchase behaviors. Targeting the Apple users will likely bring in far more money in the end.
Also it's not your job as a company to ensure the user stays up to date and secure. Old devices are really just a risk these days.