I am deeply suspicious of that number. I've never encountered a plugin or anything of the sort that provides for "blocking SVG", and it's fully supported in all recent browsers.
Paper author here. The blocking % referenced, and discussed in more detail in the paper, is the % of times a feature is used when someone visits the page, but ISNT used when you visit the page with AdBlock Plus and Ghostery installed.
In other words, its how often these popular blocking extensions prevent the JS APIs from firing.
Its not blocking SVG, its blocking (mostly fingerprinting) JS libraries from running SVG JS methods
^ Yeah. I use SVG heavily in all my web projects, and I've never seen a single user access one of my sites & had the SVG blocked. I wouldn't buy '87%' at all.
In other words, its how often these popular blocking extensions prevent the JS APIs from firing.
Its not blocking SVG, its blocking (mostly fingerprinting) JS libraries from running SVG JS methods