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98% isn't much

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Re: 98% isn't much

#101

Post by groundzeros2015 »

card_zero wrote: post #99
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the simple option is to cut lines serving small and rural communities 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 b…

Meanwhile in Britain in the 1960s, this cost-cutting closure of local rail lines did happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts ... at a time when the trains and rail infrastructure had been publicly owned for about 15 years already. It doesn't dispel the incentive.

I’m not arguing a rail has never been closed. I’m arguing that being a small difficult market doesn’t exclude you from being served by marketed forces.

Did nobody ever operate rail to those cities again due to them being rural?

Re: 98% isn't much

#102

Post by [deleted] »

RetroTechie wrote: post #87
VladVladikoff wrote: post #41

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: 98% isn't much

#104

Post by bell-cot »

rafterydj wrote: post #82
wccrawford wrote: post #25

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 t…

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.

> 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.

Re: 98% isn't much

#106

Post by card_zero »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #101
card_zero wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in Britain in the 1960s, this cost-cutting closure of local rail lines did happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts ... at a time when the trains and rail infrastructure had been publicly owned for about 15 years already. It doesn't dispel the incentive.

I’m not arguing a rail has never been closed. I’m arguing that being a small difficult market doesn’t exclude you from being served by marketed forces. Did nobody ever operate rail to those cities again due to them being rural?

Rural cities? Come again? What was demolished remained demolished, yes. Unclear on your point.

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.

Re: 98% isn't much

#107

Post by epolanski »

egorfine wrote: post #92
epolanski wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is not feasible in competitive mature markets like good part of e-commerce. As of 2024 at one of my clients we were still supporting IE8 and as of 2026 I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9 and 11 or ancient firefox/chrome versions. The reason is quite simple when you analyze the data: it's concentrated between 8.30 and 5.30 pm. Those are people sitting at their desk in a bank or…

> I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9 It's been 15 years since IE9. Where do you draw the line?

Depends on the revenue they bring vs the cost of serving them. It's highly dependent on market/business/company.

Often you simply don't offer the feature. E.g 3d rendered previews may not be available but product configuration and cart keeps working on a shop selling custom showers (you fallback to dynamic static images).

In real estate a page displaying fancy maps with price statistics by area/neighborhood might be unavailable, but the core business of listings and search does.

Re: 98% isn't much

#108

Post by StilesCrisis »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #41

I 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…

Haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure Google falls back on older browsers.

Re: 98% isn't much

#109

Post by dahart »

The close-to-home example that came to my mind while reading this is GPU programming, where the percentage multiplies. Maybe there are other similar examples where a large sounding percent needs an exponent and shrinks?

With CUDA you try to keep all threads doing the same thing. Sometimes that’s very difficult, but if each thread does the same thing 98% of the time, is that enough? Well since there are warps of 32 connected threads, you might expect the probability that any thread in the warp diverges to be .98^32, or 50% of the time spent with one thread in the diverged code. 50% still doesn’t sound that bad unless threads diverge at different times, and then 50% warp divergence might mean a 16x slowdown overall. 98% isn’t enough in this case.

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