Or, phrased another way: there's a reason why we consider basic availability in nines and 2 nines is still considered pretty bad. 99% uptime means being down over 7 hours each month.
98% isn't much
241–250 of 367 posts
Re: 98% isn't much
#242The broader point is that percentages can be misleading, and are often because of that. It makes things sound better. But usually, the more accurate thing to do is use odds-notation ("1 in 50" instead of 98%). Percentages have a kind of singularity at the edges, where small numerical changes have massive real effects. Going from a success rate of 98% to 99% doesn't sound like much, but that's failing 1 in 50 vs 1 in…
It's contextual depending on which end of the probability is the desired outcome.
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#243Earlier 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.
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.
That's what a lot of people would call a "bad business decision"
Re: 98% isn't much
#244One thing I wonder regarding browser market share is always: How is it collected? I assume Firefox users over proportionally use privacy extensions.Thus they overproportionally won't appear on Google Analytics and similar places, which for some statistics reduces the numbers even more than reality.
Most common methodologies were already garbage even a few years ago, with general consensus being that Firefox was probably undercounted by at least 30%; and in more technical arenas, it can be a lot higher, perhaps up to 80%. (Unfortunately, that’s still probably not a lot.)
Even back then, Chrome was commonly being significantly overcounted due to user-agent string shenanigans. And these days I’m confident (without any figures, or even relevant recent commercial experience) that will have increased sharply. I expect that it is now massively overcounted, at the same time as Firefox is significantly undercounted.
Statcounter is particularly commonly used, and honestly one of the worst. Its mobile figures, for example, are completely useless because they don’t report browser versions. CanIUse figures (which lean heavily but not solely on Statcounter) are lousy and unrealistic due to some of these sorts of issues, and just generally being out of date. (I examined the matter closely on 2023-05-27 and the figures corresponded with being about six weeks behind.)
Re: 98% isn't much
#245Reminds me of statistic where most customers already stop going to a particular supermarket if it stops carrying a handful of the items they want to buy 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 s…
Doesn't Aldi work against that theory?
Re: 98% isn't much
#246Alternatively, 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…
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.
Re: 98% isn't much
#247If a fancy new feature can’t degrade gracefully, then 98% isn’t “widely supported”.
Close, but the other way round. Don't avoid a feature because it lacks good enough support. Write code to progressively enhance the experience if the feature is supported in the user's browser. If you're not willing to do that, then don't use the feature.
Progressive enhancement today means you can use pretty much any browser feature you want. You just have to do a bit of legwork with some @supports or JS prototype checking after doing the basic version first. It's not really much extra work.
Re: 98% isn't much
#248Part of the problem is The US Government (and UK Government) use the "2% rule" on their websites and only officially support 98%. 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%…
If they drop support of Firefox, does that mean they would actively block Firefox?
Re: 98% isn't much
#249It reminds me of when people argued against covid restrictions saying that the virus had a 99% survival rate. A disease with a 1% infection fatality rate is a terrible disease!
Full disclosure: I also argued against covid restrictions, but not with this terrible argument.
Re: 98% isn't much
#250Its hard to find these stats now (need to use Android Studio), but about 10% of android users are on Android v9 and below. Android 9 support was recently discontinued by Chromium, such that they cannot update past Chromium 138. So, 10% of android users dont have web features beyond, at best, June 2025. caniuse.com does not track this - they lump all Chrome for android together in the latest version. This is painful a…
There seem to be updated stats here: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart Which seems to indicate about 4.8% are below Android 9. But also, Firefox for Android still supports Android 8, of which there are 1.7% below. There's a discussion to be made here about who is dropping support for these users, is it Google (and especially Apple, who doesn't allow other browsers on iOS) or the site owner? Especiall…
You're misinterpreting the stats. Those are not "updated" - they're from Dec 1, 2025 and are the latest that are available from Android Studio (I just checked again).
If you add up the distribution inclusive of Android 9 (which is what I was trying to refer to, perhaps unsuccessfully), it is 9.2%. That corresponds with the 90.7% Cumulative Distribution for Android 10
If you're arguing that it is Google who is dropping support/making people have insecure browsers, we're in agreement. As with Safari (or at least those at Apple who control/fund Safari), the Android team is very anti-Web/Chrome. Lots has been written about all of that at https://infrequently.org.
Also, since this article/post is about 98%, Android 7 and below account for 2% of usage still, and its max Chrome version is 124, which was released in April 2024.