It depends on your requirements. The term that should have been mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
98% isn't much
171–180 of 367 posts
Re: 98% isn't much
#172There'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 h…
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#173Alternatively, 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 t…
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).
Re: 98% isn't much
#174I usually go by CanIUse's global percentage when deciding if I can utilize a new browser feature, and right now it's 90.81% ( https://caniuse.com/css-nesting ) That's a bit lower than I would be comfortable with, however not that bad, we have been even considering switching all our images to AVIF: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF And google uses Webp all over the place and that's sitting at 96% https://caniuse.com/we…
Global statistics don't matter. What matters is current & potential visitors to your site. And how badly you want them served. A professional B2B car parts dealer has a very different user profile than say, a local news site in rural Africa. A site selling concert tickets (for popular artist) probably won't care if site doesn't work for 5% of visitors, the tickets will just take a bit longer to sell out. But otoh I'm…
With images specifically it’s a tradeoff. For image heavy sites like mine, the performance gains provided by webp for the 96% outweigh the potential degradation for the 4%. We get a fair amount of support tickets but not a single ticket has said “I can’t see your images on my X device” since switching to webp (~6months ago)
Re: 98% isn't much
#175Alternatively, 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 t…
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#176Wasn't there something in statistics to describe something like this? i.e. gaussian distributions vs something that's modeled on sparse occurrences, etc?
Re: 98% isn't much
#177I usually go by CanIUse's global percentage when deciding if I can utilize a new browser feature, and right now it's 90.81% ( https://caniuse.com/css-nesting ) That's a bit lower than I would be comfortable with, however not that bad, we have been even considering switching all our images to AVIF: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF And google uses Webp all over the place and that's sitting at 96% https://caniuse.com/we…
The author doesn't say you can't use features with 98% (or even less) support. What they say is that you have to ensure that your site still works for the remaining users, through graceful degradation. If people have new fancy browsers, use their features to make the interface jazzy. If they don't, ensure that the site still offers its core functionality to them without the fancy features.
That’s not actually possible with the example given in the article (dropping scss and moving to nested css), it’s all or nothing for many cases.
Re: 98% isn't much
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s very difficult for the average person to use a ten year old browser; in fact I’d offer that the only way to use a ten year old browser is to be an expert and do so intentionally.
There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers. There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason. These people just use the sites that work. They aren't computer experts, and might not even realise why half the internet doesn't work - they just think that's the way things are.
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#179Alternatively, 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 t…
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…
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#180>> But a restaurant where clients don’t get of food poisoning 98% of time is getting people sick on a monthly (or even weekly) basis. Objectively, I think it's impossible to work in the food industry and avoid food poisoning 100% of the time. One of the reasons I never attempted several of my food industry business ideas. I'm certain they would be at least profitable enough to keep going, would be rather trivial to a…
I suppose in most industries, but in others a bug in a computer programming has more serious consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 comes to mind. Many of the really consequential ones end up on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs