Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream. Website visitors can upgrade their browser.
98% isn't much
181–190 of 367 posts
Re: 98% isn't much
#182That's why things never get better. I mean, i'm all out for retrocompatibility, but if removing something makes my experience much better and unfortunately the thing stops working for 2% of the people with outdated devices/browsers, it's not that sad, but the tradeoffs need to be measured.
I've been in the two ends of this situation, in the 2% with older iPhones and Android devices, and in the 98% with new devices. The 2% cannot hold a tyranny over the absolute majority, and vice versa. Everything must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Re: 98% isn't much
#183While 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…
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%.
Re: 98% isn't much
#184I like stuff that takes a statistic that we view one way and explains how to see it another way
in this sense, related https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
Re: 98% isn't much
#185If 2 out of 100 people I know see a broken website, depending on the website, that's fine, that doesn't sound like a big deal. Now, if out of 10 power users, all ten of them see a broken site once every 50 logins? Thats a much bigger deal. 98% can be more than enough or not remotely enough depending on the units involved but there are plenty of cases where it's fine to not support the last 2 internet explorer users and stuff
Re: 98% isn't much
#186Alternatively, 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…
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#187After Christmas this year, I removed the tree from our living room, and in the process of being moved, it shed of needles everywhere. I swept them up, but I missed a few areas on my first pass. So I did a second pass, but when I looked again, I saw there were still a handful left. It struck me how removing >99% of the needles was nowhere near acceptable! Lots of cleaning jobs are like this, I suppose, because even a tiny mess can be visually distinct. In fact, as you approach 100%, the remaining mess stands out more.
Re: 98% isn't much
#188I thought this was gonna be about uptime.
Well I wasn't very far off I guess! Perhaps "5 nines" is a good threshold for new CSS features too?
Re: 98% isn't much
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#190After Christmas this year, I removed the tree from our living room, and in the process of being moved, it shed of needles everywhere . I swept them up, but I missed a few areas on my first pass. So I did a second pass, but when I looked again, I saw there were still a handful left. It struck me how removing >99% of the needles was nowhere near acceptable! Lots of cleaning jobs are like this, I suppose, because even a…
exactly how I feel every time I weed the yard. I'll end up with a pile of weeds, look over my work and see weeds everywhere still