[wccrawford]

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.

[dataviz1000]

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.

[thephyber]

This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.

(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.

You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.

(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.

(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.

(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).

If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.

[dataviz1000]

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

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 delivers mail to rural farmers 100 years ago would lose money. There are 3 options. 1. If farmers want mail, they can pay the extra costs. 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 delivery 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.

[thephyber]

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.

[thephyber]

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.

[spiffytech]

Why would farmers disagree?

[DonnieP]

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."

[ipaddr]

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.

[dieselgate]

> 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.

[explodingwaffle]

man, HN is awesome

[bonzini]

It's spelled osso buco though.

[dataviz1000]

Your comment very much makes my point.

[bonzini]

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.

[filoleg]

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.

[faidit]

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

[sandspar]

Michelin, yachts... How'd you find your way to an obscure tech forum like HackerNews?

[benj111]

Because they like tech? Are now working in tech?

Both fields combine creativity with technical know how. It wouldn't surprise me if there were loads of wood and metal workers here too.

[pinkmuffinere]

This sounds very fun! I would love to hear more stories if you have 'em!

[hn_throwaway_99]

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).

[throwaway173738]

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.

[Eridrus]

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.

[godelski]

I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!!

The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars.

The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues

[Eridrus]

He is saying the most inane things ever, I don't know why I need to be charitable here.

[tikhonj]

Kicking out 2% of your existing customers in a physical venue violates people's expectations, so it's going to get you disproportionate bad reviews and word-of-mouth.

Good thing that we've managed to keep everybody's expectations a hell of a lot lower for software quality then :)

[inigyou]

Every nightclub in Berlin has a few Google reviews that say "we were black and they didn't let us in because they are racist." These are the reviews you will see on Google and it can dampen your excitement before you even leave your home.

[Dylan16807]

But if they instead were blocking the people with the 2% most out of date fashion, then it's not an issue. The problem is the racism not the 98% acceptance rate.

[zem]

imagine not 2% of users not being able to use the site, but any given user not being able to use the site 2% of the time, and see if that changes the calculus for you.

[Dylan16807]

Yeah, that changes it, in both positive and negative ways.

I can't tell if this is in support of the article or not though.

[abustamam]

I mean that's my experience with a lot of modern software anyway. I have to reload or force close and reopen or please try again.

[hn_throwaway_99]

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.

[godelski]

Isn't the end of the article saying that their users are mainly in that tail? Seems to be exactly what you say: figuring out who those 2% are. In the OP's case, it's 30% of their users

[dpark]

98% of HN commenters reply to the interpretation of the article they feel most capable of arguing against, which is usually the least charitable one.

[s3p]

I mean the name was "98% isn't much" and the article made it sound like 98% isn't good enough

[ryandrake]

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.

[dfabulich]

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.

[ToucanLoucan]

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.

[paczki]

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.

[0] https://caniuse.com/css-nesting

[anoneng]

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.

[drdeca]

Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ?

I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites should reach 100%, only that they should start from there and sacrifice only as much as is necessary.

[autoexec]

> I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask.

The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.

[anoneng]

But this isn’t about websites or just publishing articles or the weather. It’s about web applications, commerce, products, things with customers not just readers. As soon as you have an application that’s doing anything nontrivial then you have to draw a line and say “nope we’re not supporting that at all” and there’s sections along the line where you can’t even fail gracefully.

In the real world that means there is a list of browsers and versions tested on.

[anoneng]

Completely bad faith reply when your example uses zero CSS, no HTML links even, and the only script to distinguish it from a bare static text document is google analytics malware. This isn’t falling back, it is the fallback. Expecting most modern web application to function at that level is for most purposes, simply stupid. Like putting hitching posts in a high rise apartment’s sub-basement parking levels.

[Dylan16807]

Only a couple percent of websites have a significant need to be "modern web applications".

Yes that is the fallback. That doesn't make it a bad example. Your core functionality should work on almost everything even if it's laid out a bit weird and missing niceties.

So: not bad faith and your accusation is unreasonable

[pavon]

That is neglecting network effects. Less than 10% of the US population is vegetarian, but if a restaurant doesn't have any vegetarian options they lose business not just from that 10% but from any party that has a single vegetarian. Likewise, if a website has any social network effect, disregarding a portion of the population will decrease use from a much larger percentage than those directly affected.

Furthermore, even if your site functionality has no social networking component itself, all business are subject to the network effects of word of mouth. People are much more likely to share negative experiences that positive ones, so if 1/50 of people find your site to be broken, then a considerable amount of feedback online will be negative and will harm your reputation for the entire market, not just that 2%.

Finally, in business you have to work hard to win over even a small portion of your total addressable market. Artificially decreasing your TAM can be fine if it is an intentional strategic decision to focus on a specific market, but pointless to exclude people without good reason. Not having vegetarian options at BBQ restaurant in Texas is harmless - no one goes there for that, but if you are running a more general restaurant it would be foolish not to have a few vegetarian options. Excluding people because your web developers are too lazy to use approaches that have worked fine for the last 20 years and need to use the new shiny is even more foolish.

[itake]

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.

[mmmattt]

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.

[mrhottakes]

That's what a lot of people would call a "bad business decision"

[MichaelZuo]

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.

[autoexec]

uber's website already requires JS to book a ride. Fortunately taxi companies still exist and can just be called by phone.

[igsomething]

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.

[anoneng]

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.

[account42]

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.

[abofh]

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"

[igsomething]

I agree, but one thing is to demand all your users to be on the latest Chrome, and another one is to support browsers that are no longer maintained and contain security issues (IE). If we discourage people from driving old insecure cars, we can also discourage people from using old insecure browsers.

[bee_rider]

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.

[zero-sharp]

I like how you equate 10 year old browser users with luddites?

[bradleybuda]

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.

[londons_explore]

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.

[zamadatix]

I think you're conflating "old device" with "10 year old browser" here. E.g. for:

> There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason.

It'd be "the pool of people who installed Windows 10 immediately in the launch year but somehow accidentally blocked their browser from updating in the 10 years since, weren't able to fix the issue as the web slowly stopped working, and are stuck using that computer anyways" not "the pool of people still on Windows 10".

The latter won't have many non-intentionally pushed into "10 year old browser status" until 2038 at the earliest.

[rvba]

When will Microsoft stop doing Windows 10 security updates?

I have a 10 year old laptop with 32GB of RAM, GTX 970 6GB and an SSD. For many things it is better than any 16GB work issued laptop (that often come with integrated cards - so you wont be able to run any AI model on them). Although the old ssd is starting to show its age (perhaps a full system reinstall would solve this, other option is to get a new one).

The old laptop does not have UEFI so it could not get the (free for some time) Windows 10 to 11 upgrade.

I am smart enough to install Firefox on it and update it, but the official Windows 10 updates will stop coming soon.

I was effectively kicked out by Microsoft because my device is "old". Even if it is beefy enough to browse the internet and watch youtube.

Note that I bought a new beefy laptop now that I hope to use for the next 5+ years (hopefully more), but who knows if they wont come out with some new idea, like UEFI 2.0 for Windows 12 - that again will mean we need to buy new hardware and new windows.

On an unrelated note I want to turn the old laptop to a linux machine - for fun and learning, but dont have the time for that.

[zamadatix]

> When will Microsoft stop doing Windows 10 security updates?

Last October, unless you are on an LTS type version - in which case somewhere between 2028-2032 (depending on the exact version). Edge will still update until at least 2028 even though the OS stopped receiving updates... though I'm not sure I would wish either of those usage scenarios on someone :).

> The old laptop does not have UEFI so it could not get the (free for some time) Windows 10 to 11 upgrade.

The free registration, they never actually axed the program at the end date https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows10spa.... Just make sure you use the same edition (e.g. Pro -> Pro). You also don't have to do an in place upgrade to do it. In your specific scenario, you would have to bypass the install requirements in the installer to get around the lack of UEFI though.

Hope that helps, Windows 11 is definitely a bit of an annoying step (even once it's installed).

[Dylan16807]

Notably, Firefox for Windows 7 has all features through mid 2023 and is still getting security updates for a bit longer.

[ben_w]

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.

[autoexec]

I have a 10 year old cell phone that still gets regular use. Works just fine for things like phone calls, texts, youtube (newpipe), termux, and note taking. Original battery isn't great at this point, but a new one is maybe $15. Zero reason to replace it.

[lukasbm]

I am an expert and half the internet does not work. That's just the way things are

[alternatex]

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.

[zarzavat]

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.

[Macha]

Eventually you are making things worse for your vast majority of users when you have to e.g. make them install a native app for a video call or use a TLS version that is broken to support those Gingerbread Android phones

[Natfan]

> windows 10

or windows 8[.1], or windows 7, or windows xp... there's a lot of old hardware out there, not every is rich/tech savvy (see also: old people) enough to purchase a new device even 10 years later

[mattmatheus]

I'm not sure this is a realistic use case to try and support. A 10 year old android phone likely has a battery life measured in 10s of minutes, and really isn't something we need to worry about.

[epihelix]

I'm currently using >7 year old Android phone. The batteries on these things are child's play to replace (especially after you've done it the first time and removed the pointless adhesive in the battery compartment). I will consider upgrading once new devices return to feature parity with my current device (apparently never).

While I'm of course an edge case, the fact that Google, Apple and Samsung all provide >5 years OS support for devices now (and battery replacement services) suggests that many people hang onto their old phones for a long time.

That said, I'm not using 7 year old software on my phone. That would be insane. And my browser (fennec) was updated just a few days ago.

[swiftcoder]

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

[londons_explore]

Usually you get a guy at the mall to swap in a new battery for $10.

For $50 you can buy a whole new phone (refurb that is 4 yrs old from some other country)

[mananaysiempre]

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.

[compiler-guy]

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.

[jollyllama]

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.

[esrauch]

I wouldn't conflate old computers and old browsers. I still use an over 10 year old laptop and it still has a latest browser.

[anoneng]

Right. That problem is bloat, not lack of legacy support. Adding (already bloated) legacy support to already bloated software just makes bloat worse.

[intrasight]

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.

[troupo]

Or use a smart TV (most apps on TVs are web apps. Enjoy: https://developer.samsung.com/smarttv/develop/specifications...

[swiftcoder]

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.

[Dylan16807]

> They don't install updates very often (if at all).

The average person with zero tech savvy has their browser updating itself regularly with no input from the user. Are they escaping that?

[__alexs]

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.

[jawilson2]

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."

[pixl97]

Well, being these days that a browser over 5 minutes old probably has a security flaw, it's not much of a reach.

[ngriffiths]

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.

[steego]

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.

[boelboel]

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).

[dd8601fn]

A lesson taught to millions of businesses by GroupOn.

[SoftTalker]

Most managers I've had preached the "80/20" rule, so 80% was good enough.

[jeremyjh]

Browsers have been good enough for pretty much every reasonable purpose for more than 10 years, and compatibility has been really good for that long as well. Is it really challenging or costly to support a feature set that old? In 2017 an app I built worked on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge without any effort or testing other than on Chrome. It still supports all those. At that time, there were probably more than 2% IE users on the general internet but this was B2B.

Just a couple of up-front choices regarding css frameworks and polyfill libraries were all that was required to do that.

I'm open to believing it could be costly for some projects, but I'm more inclined to believe its mostly chasing FOTM, ignorance and laziness that leads to < 98% support.

[dheera]

For most businesses, yes.

If you're the national railway and your ticket purchase website doesn't work for 2% of the population, that's kind of shitty to those people.

This is sadly very common across many public infrastructure websites and apps.

[inigyou]

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.

[Tarq0n]

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.

[robalni]

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.

[anoneng]

I love lynx as much as anyone but it is ludicrous to expect webapp developers to support no script and no CSS.

[robalni]

Expect is not what I do but I fight for it.

[HWR_14]

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.

[mrhottakes]

Plenty for who/what? I think you've assumed a bunch of facts that aren't true for every situation.

[rafterydj]

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.

[bell-cot]

> 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.

[cyanydeez]

or if your business plan needs to dedicate 2% of your earnings to litigation from the problems it causes.

[miltonlost]

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.