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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, Uber, a Visa immigration website, low cost air carrier booking site, etc.
As long as it’s credibly offered without too many caveats.
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.
> 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.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
For $50 you can buy a whole new phone (refurb that is 4 yrs old from some other country)
Computers that were EOL a few years ago, running ten-year-old browsers, are absolutely routine.
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.
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.
I use a browser that had its last release less than a year ago. It doesn't do CSS, it doesn't do javascript and I love it. I also love to be able to use the websites I need.
If your 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.
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.
We don’t see this in practice to though. Three examples:
1. In the airline industry big airlines don’t go everywhere for this reasons but small local airlines fill the gap due to market opportunity.
2. Changes in technology enable big companies to operate more efficiently. See starlink.
3. Big companies know that ubiquity is important for their brand. In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US.
Also it's not just Wales where Beeching carried out intense vandalism of public infrastructure, the South West was severely affected too. Basically anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power. The general assumption was that private cars would replace the local trains, which as someone who currently doesn't drive for medical reasons really makes my blood boil. While perhaps not in intent, in effect the Beeching Axe was a profound kick in the teeth for the disabled.
Did nobody ever operate rail to those cities again due to them being rural?
Oh I see (thanks to that edit). I mean, I agree with you. This is just the additional amusing detail that government-run services are still subject to a sort of dulled and homogenous version of market forces, which can be worse for small local concerns because it's less responsive. Though, admittedly, a giant corporation can simulate government very well, and can be just as crap.
> A few of these routes have since reopened. Some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes
> Some, such as the bulk of the Midland Metro network around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, have since been incorporated into light rail lines.
Furthermore, the transformation to other transportation forms suggests this event also coincides with changing technology.
Amazon delivers everywhere because USPS subsidizes package delivery to unprofitable areas. You don’t get next day prime except in a relatively small proportion of the country (by area).
You’re not wrong, but small and rural airports would not be able to maintain even these routes without EAS (essential air services) subsidies
"In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US." You know they use the Postal Service for last miles often? And the Postal Service is required by law to service far-flung places. So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
Did you miss the part where the conversation was about Ticketmaster and rails were used as an analogy for understanding the problem?
> So Amazon is only, in practice, delivering packages to those places due to USPS.
I don’t think that’s true as I can buy many things on Amazon which cannot be shipped via USPS.
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%.
Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.
SPF is like this. SPF 30 allows 1/30th (3%) of the UV through it, blocking 29/30ths (97%). SPF 50 (2%) allows 1/50th, blocking 49/50ths (98%). Using the denominator, in this case, expressed the efficacy much more intuitively.
Comparing SPF 30 vs 50 better expresses the increase in efficacy than 97% vs 98% does.
One could also express it as the amount that passes the filter but it is Sun _Protection_ Factor not Sun _Transparency_ Factor.
The only intuitive bit about that system is "bigger number does more." I feel like I would have more readily understood it if it just said "blocks 97% (or 98%) of UV light" instead of numbers I assumed were somewhat arbitrary.
But sometimes small differences at the edges are indeed small, particularly for expected values. Say you win 100 dollars with 98% probability vs with 99.9% probability.
The expected value (probability * dollars) of the latter is only slightly higher than the former ($99.9-$98=$1.90) even though the difference in odds is very large: (0.999/0.001)/(0.98/0.02)≈20.39. So the 99.9% probability is odds 999 to 1, 98% probability is 49 to 1, so the former has more than 20 times higher odds, but the expected amount of money you win is almost the same.
CSS on a website, however, you CAN get partial credit (to an extent). It may not be perfect, but it's at least theoretically still providing some value partially.
I think knowing what kind of problem you're facing is really important when it comes to measuring percentage of "complete".
Of course, you do not know this exactly, but the point is that it's easy to look at the wrong statistic and come to conclusions that are not necessarily useful in some context. The lens matters just as much as the percentage, if not more.
It may sound like a small deal to not carry one brand of chocolate paste but if some customers then also don't buy the 12 other groceries they need at your shop, it doesn't really matter that it's only 2% of products that were discontinued. Supermarket products are so stable not because nobody ever makes anything new but because changing a small percentage frustrates customers
If I can't order from some website, I stop trying. Maybe next week the ESR browser gets an update and it works again but by then I'm not clicking those links in the search results
If I'm one of the 2% then that's everything for me. Maybe I have good reasons to be in the 2%. And maybe, not caring about that is wrong.
I would rather have a website that only works for 2% of people for the right reason, than a website that doesn't work for 2% for the wrong reason.
I mentioned 3 years ago that Firefox at 2.2% is dangerously close the being unsupported on government websites, and at this point it's now at 1.9%.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603
https://analytics.usa.gov/ says "There were 1.66 billion sessions in the last 30 days." - so 2% is 33 million sessions if I did my math right.