10 ms·

98% isn't much

• sneak 4mo ago
  Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream. Website visitors can upgrade their browser.
  • panny 4mo ago
    >Venues did kick out a lot more than 2% of their existing customers until they upgraded their bloodstream. Only temporarily. Some never mRNAed their bloodstream, then everyone with brain fog forgot about the Trump vaccine and the new normal went back to normal.
• panny 4mo ago
  I couldn't agree more. BTW, 98% of US users have JavaScript enabled in 2025. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/No-JavaScript_notes https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/No-JavaScript_notes
  • kardianos 4mo ago
    100% of this will be self-inflicted no javascript and 0% of the people who I am targeting. The Galaxy Brain isn't global usage, it is overlapping populations. Will any percentage of them care about any percentage of me? Put another way, many people decided to effectively drop support for IE11. When my client has even a single client who still uses IE11, we don't drop support even when it is "bad to support it". But when that drops to zero, regardless of what anyone else is doing, then we can drop support for IE11.
• zipy124 4mo ago
  This concept is missed so much in AI research and is quite frustrating.
• msephton 4mo ago
  Reminds me of the Meat Loaf song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” which was released in Japan as 66%の誘惑 “66% is Good Enough” etc https://www.discogs.com/release/8303076 https://www.discogs.com/release/8303076
  • phishin 4mo ago
    Greatest thing I’ve learned today. Thank you.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 4mo ago
    Isn't 誘惑 more like “allure, temptation, seduction”?
    • mghackerlady 4mo ago
      My Japanese is very bad, but I think it would be translated back into english as 'the allure of 66%'
      • msephton 4mo ago
        There are many ways to translate it "66% Seduction", "66%'ll do" etc. But debating the translation misses 66% of the point that it's just a fun fact ;)
        • mghackerlady 4mo ago
          Of course. I just wanted to flex my (not very good) Japanese skillz B)
          • msephton 4mo ago
            I appreciate them! Keep at it :)
• arealaccount 4mo ago
  I wonder how much traffic from bots is skewing OPs nested CSS calculations
  • kstrauser 4mo ago
    Huh, good point. I have a shocking number of visitors saying they use IE 7 on Mac OS 9 on Intel.
• atan2 4mo ago
  That reminds me of an old comic where a guy picks a milk carton from the grocery store shelf and reads in the box: "Now with 0.01% less semen." and he does not know if he's happy or sad about it.
• eknkc 4mo ago
  I agree the general premise but do not agree when it comes to browser support. I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
  • iamflimflam1 4mo ago
    Agreed - there’s a point where supporting old out of date browsers is simply an enabler.
  • carlosjobim 4mo ago
    Why? There are no features which aren't supported by 10 year old browsers which can bring more sales or improve the user experience. So who are these new features good for?
    • egorfine 4mo ago
      My development comfort is worth more than the service for users with vastly outdated browser.
      • carlosjobim 4mo ago
        That spells lost sales if you're doing it as a job. Or at least lack of access for people with older devices if you're doing it as a hobby. Then it's of course your call.
  • levmiseri 4mo ago
    This is very context dependent. It's 'fine' having such attitude when it comes to a hobby project or personal website – not so much for ecommerce site. And imo you are missing the key part of the article – graceful degradation. Designing for the ideal (or for the <98%) is fine. As long as the experience is gracefully degraded for the rest.
    • 4mo ago
• high_na_euv 4mo ago
  Depends on the context
• theragra 4mo ago
  Pragmatically, often users without new browsers and OSses are not the best clients. In ideal world, sure, I want to support everyone. In a world with limited resources, I would better spend my time elsewhere.
  • kgeist 4mo ago
    >Pragmatically, often users without new browsers and OSses are not the best clients Hmm, it could be fat enterprise clients with locked-down software versions (legacy, security etc.) That's where most of the money is, isn't it?
    • pixl97 4mo ago
      If you make enterprise software then, ya, target that. If you're selling tickets to a venue, then your site is blocked by them anyway. This article is a weird extremist take.
• vb-8448 4mo ago
  If it's uptime it's definitively not much!
  • dango369 4mo ago
    this made me lol
• theandrewbailey 4mo ago
  1% failure rate of a hundred might be acceptable. 1% failure rate of a million is not. Isn't that a named law?
• amelius 4mo ago
  This applies to AI too. Your classifier might be 98% accurate and it may sound like a lot. But if it sits inside a car, making thousands of decisions during every trip then you may be in deep trouble.
• WaitWaitWha 4mo ago
  The author seems to equivocate by comparing completely different domains. Whether 98% is acceptable, it depends on the cost of failure, not the percentage itself.
• 217 4mo ago
  while true, the people who will read this and then think twice about implementing and applying things are exactly the people who already doing too much thinking
• cantalopes 4mo ago
  I am not exactly sure what is the article trying to point out
• nilirl 4mo ago
  > Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases. How do you justify this when you factor in cost and time?
• BigRedEye 4mo ago
  I think this single fact is a major source of enshittification in large software products, especially in the era of ML/AI. If your quality is 99%, it sounds like "you have solved your task", but in reality there is a long tail that over time affects nearly every customer. I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboard panes load normally (so a dashboard with 20 panes is broken in nearly 1 in 5 loads), and so on. If your LLM gets 99% of tool calls right, nearly every session will contain a malformed tool call. Probabilities are hard for humans, probably.
  • z3c0 4mo ago
    When measuring and reporting models to the non-saavy, I usually reframe them into odds. One failure for every 49 successes is a scary failure rate when operating at a large scale. This is largely why I don't condone LLMs in operational pipelines. Your workflow? Fine. The company's? Hell no.
  • mewpmewp2 4mo ago
    Alternatively getting the last piece of 1% could mean 99% of the effort. Would you consider it fruitful to chase 100%?
• abap_rocky 4mo ago
  > Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”? This reminds me almost precisely of the dynamics of pro sports in the US and how fans are getting priced out of attending games or even watching teams on TV as organizations shift to bespoke streaming platforms.
• qarl2 4mo ago
  It's just mathematical expectation. Don't look at the simple probability - look at probability * value.
  • rossant 4mo ago
    aka expectation
    • qarl2 4mo ago
      Yes. That's why I said "expectation".
• wccrawford 4mo ago
  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 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.
  • zero-sharp 4mo ago
    I like how you equate 10 year old browser users with luddites?
    • bradleybuda 4mo ago
      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.
      • troupo 4mo ago
        Or use a smart TV (most apps on TVs are web apps. Enjoy: https://developer.samsung.com/smarttv/develop/specifications/web-engine-specifications.html https://developer.samsung.com/smarttv/develop/specifications...
      • londons_explore 4mo ago
        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.
        • 4mo ago
• mewpmewp2 4mo ago
  There'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 have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office. If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it. And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.
  • account42 4mo ago
    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.
    • mewpmewp2 4mo ago
      A lot of the time it's not software developers who define it and it's about the budget. Usually it's the product decision. E.g. an agency who has constant recurring experience with it might indicate that supporting N% browsers costs this much with cost increasing the higher the percentage. E.g. you want to use CSS flex you might get 97% to 99% of all World users, because there's going to be certain percentage for which it won't work. If you claim to support those old browsers you will need to test with them too and be able to easily spin up etc It's not just knowledge of what you can or can't use, it will be extra permutations of testing everything.
      • 4mo ago
• huqedato 4mo ago
  What about those 30% of audience to update their browser? On our web platform, the team currently displays a message along the lines of: 'Please update your browser; this site relies on features incompatible with your current version'.
  • panny 4mo ago
    Do you sell the t-shirt also? :) https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Best-Viewed-with-Internet-Explorer-by-ijko/8021750/z5wf https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Best-Viewed-with-Interne...
• buntp 4mo ago
  Isn't this obvious? In some categories, certainty and percentages make a lot of difference--surgeries, accidents. In some, they don't--surveys, grades. It just depends on the category. This is akin to saying something as obvious as more percentages are more than less percentages.
• MatekCopatek 4mo ago
  While 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 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.
  • Certhas 4mo ago
    Infrastructure should not be (purely) profit driven. To improve profits for train operators, the simple option is to cut lines serving small and rural communities. The economics are much worse than serving large cities. Same for cell coverage and broadband internet. Most profitable is to just not cover a few percent of the population. There is a point where technology becomes foundational for participating in society. And then it needs to be regulated to be available to everyone.
    • groundzeros2015 4mo ago
      > 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 brand. In practice Amazon will deliver packages across the US.
      • miltonlost 4mo ago
• mariopt 4mo ago
  Nice in theory, in practice I remember having to support Internet Explorer about 4 years ago. Hard to justify the investment sometimes, at least polyfills gave use some sanity back. The only reason to do it was: Rich old enterprise customer who can't install chrome due to policies created by Dinosaurs. Websites are surprisingly hard to maintain long term, specially for a broad audience of devices. Developer Experience can lead to better UX, the easier it is to build/maintain, the more likely we're to do it. Given how bad AI is at design plus all the unstoppable slop train, I expect websites to become much, much worse.
• Waterluvian 4mo ago
  Covering for the 2% is often not a sound first order business decision. There's certainly higher order benefits. A lot of accessibility features are just plain useful for anyone. And I think companies like Apple generally get that it's a kind of loss leader. But this article makes dishonest TV Shopping Network style arguments like pointing at 150 million as if that was ever an addressable market. I think either you argue for regulation, or you argue more honestly: asserting that the extra cost will likely never directly pay for itself, but it is some of the secret sauce that can a good product into a great one.
  • pixl97 4mo ago
    I'd say you're the most correct of the bunch in this discussion. In the vast majority of business ventures the vast majority of your population is not going to be a customer, ever. Look at statistics of things like apple vs android users and their purchase behaviors. Targeting the Apple users will likely bring in far more money in the end. Also it's not your job as a company to ensure the user stays up to date and secure. Old devices are really just a risk these days.
• VladVladikoff 4mo ago
  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 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 https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF And google uses Webp all over the place and that's sitting at 96% https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp Author's 98% take is a bit misguided.
  • andrewingram 4mo ago
    For anyone who didn't know, caniuse lets you upload your actual usage data. Then for any capability, next to global support you also see the stats for your user-base. https://caniuse.com/ciu/settings#usage https://caniuse.com/ciu/settings#usage
  • StilesCrisis 4mo ago
    Haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure Google falls back on older browsers.
  • RetroTechie 4mo ago
    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 sure there's many businesses out there who wouldn't mind a 2..5% bump in conversion ratio for very little effort. Personally I don't care. If I'm out to buy something online & webshop doesn't work or takes too long to load, my purchase goes elsewhere. And ofc government services should be very conservative in this respect. Edit: and yes, graceful degradation. It's ok if site doesn't look as intended but is still useable for that 2%. And eg. I love that some news site have a text-only lite version.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
• sinsterizme 4mo ago
  We shouldn't go out of our way to support IE11 anymore, sorry
• ericfrederich 4mo ago
  Relavent XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/325/ https://xkcd.com/325/ Hover text: You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.
• Unai 4mo ago
  I blame it in big part on the WebDX community group, their absolutely useless "Baseline" guidelines, and on them allowing Apple to be part of that group and make decisions on what features are "ready" to use whilst being behind the only non-evergreen browser in 2026. The "baseline" means nothing. The percentage in caniuse means nothing. The only number that matters is the number of Safari users stuck using a no longer supported Apple device that access your website. Of course Apple makes sure to hide usage stats of older devices. Everyone complains about only having three browser engines out there, but I'll be happy to go down to two if that means freeing the world from Safari.
  • timw4mail 4mo ago
    And I see the opposite: Safari is a valuable check on constant additions and bloat to the web platform.
• trjordan 4mo ago
  I was heading to dinner with a friend who worked in infra. Google maps said we could bike across town in 20 minutes. He suggested we leave 40 minutes ahead of time and grab a drink at the bar if we got there early. When I raised an eyebrow, he goes: "What, do you not live your life based on 99th percentiles?" I tend to think of work as upside-based on downside-based. Most feature work is upside. 10% lift on conversions is great, 40% adoption is winning, and you're playing for the moonshot of 10x. Infra work is downside-based. 98% secure, 98% available, 98% acceptable performance -- that'll all failure. Winning means the thing works as expected and nobody notices. Not everything sorts cleanly into upside vs. downside, but a lot does. Allocate your risk accordingly.
  • steadystate_eng 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • blitzar 4mo ago
    I live my life a 1/4 of a percentile at a time ... For those ten seconds or less, I'm free.
• MichaelRo 4mo ago
  >> 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 access EU subsidy money in the €50k, but the amount of regulations and inspections terrifies me. And I'm sure at some point, some salmonella or what else would slip through and don't wanna deal with the consequences. Easier with programming computers since a "bug" won't make people expell waste simultaneously through both incoming and outgoing food orifices, like it happend to me last time I ordered sarmale from a local restaurant. Like in the food industry a "bug" is literally that.
  • TheCycoONE 4mo ago
    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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs
• aaron695 4mo ago
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• aaron695 4mo ago
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• mellosouls 4mo ago
  Off topic (and at risk of being downvoted), I don't think I'll ever get a better chance to insist here that "99 and a half won't do" https://youtu.be/1QVJCjbgM-s https://youtu.be/1QVJCjbgM-s Holy Disciples Trying to Make a Hundred
  • marking-time 4mo ago
    Thank you :)
• cj17382 4mo ago
  This whole article is a categorical error. Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context. You can argue endlessly by shifting the topic that 98% is used on. I guess that's what people are doing here.
  • miltonlost 4mo ago
    "Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context" is exactly what the article was saying....
• Panzerschrek 4mo ago
  There are cases when providing service for remaining 2% isn't profitable. It's better just say "sorry". I used to work in company where we have spent a lot of time making custom fixes for our software in order to work-around wired hardware/software bugs on machines of individual customers. Yes, we provided service for remaining 2% or so, but in cost of slowing-down overall product development and not making our product better for remaining 98%.
  • xdertz 4mo ago
    So how about also getting rid of all regulations for wheelchair friendly infrastructure while we are at it? Way too expensive and it is even less than 2% of the population that requires it.
    • Panzerschrek 4mo ago
      Public infrastructure is different. It should work for everyone. My argument is more about commercial products with profitability kept in mind.
      • deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      • inigyou 4mo ago
        In a lot of countries, commercial products have to be wheelchair-accessible or you get sued.
    • shooly 4mo ago
      People in wheelchairs literally need them to live, they have no alternative. People who don't update browsers for years (or even decades) do so willingly.
    • groundzeros2015 4mo ago
      Great idea. We should reevaluate how effective these policies are. The ADA favored visible signs of disability accommodation for political reasons rather than the most essential services. Many historical sites are not available to the public due to this regulation.
• thenewnewguy 4mo ago
  This analogy is bad: Nobody is going to die or get food poisoning because their old browser doesn't work on a website. A better analogy would be a restaurant deciding not to cater to the 1% of the US population that have celiac disease (cannot eat gluten), or the 2% that have issues with dairy.
• christina97 4mo ago
  But is it? Addressing 98%of TAM, is? Suppose 98% users have not had any sessions crash. You want to build an addon feature that 10% of your users will buy and which will increase the revenue from those users by 30%. Do you spend time building the feature, or trying to understand why 2% of users sometimes see crashes?
• Aachen 4mo ago
  Reminds 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 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
  • doublepg23 4mo ago
    Doesn't Aldi work against that theory?
    • Aachen 4mo ago
      Dunno. I stopped shopping at Aldi because we always needed to visit another store anyway, so for me that theory still holds. They've also taken cheap veggie chocolate milk out of the assortment, and the store next door introduced it, so there isn't any unique(ly cheap) product there that I can't get at the more expensive store and that's where we now do all our shopping. We only ever still visit Aldi when the Edeka, next door, is out of some product that Aldi has In trying to find the exact figure earlier, I did see a paper where they classified people as one-, two-, or three-stop shoppers. Seems to be common, seeing as a lot of stores here are actually adjacent. You don't see that much in NL where I'm from. Anyway, I didn't end up finding back this figure and I don't know to which market this was supposed to apply; maybe in places like France the hypermarkets have everything without being expensive and it applies more to that? All results I found were about how amazing this company's loyalty cards are and you (the supermarket) should totally introduce them for better retention
• hadi121 4mo ago
  I like to think it depends on what the actual topic is. Even the article's examples reinforce this. 98% market share? Amazing. 98% browser support? There are 15 billion screens in the world. 2% of that is 300 million. Hardly a number we can ignore. Edge cases for those 2% should be considered and implemented
• adverbly 4mo ago
  Software isn't the product though. Just like the article says, it depends on if the product is an essential or a dessert. If your product is a "essential necessity" one, then 98% is terrible for your software. If your product is a "dessert", then for it's software 98% is awesome.
• londons_explore 4mo ago
  In today's world of AI it's fairly easy to make your site compatible with every version of internet explorer ever. Just tell the AI to do it. It'll find a way. The maintenance burden for you will be minimal because the AI can keep the legacy compatibility bits in sync.
  • flerchin 4mo ago
    Good luck bro.
  • cryptonym 4mo ago
    > Just tell the AI to do it This is the new Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything
• red_admiral 4mo ago
  I guarantee you, if your product is a mobile app, you're excluding more than 2% of the population.
• EugeneOZ 4mo ago
  If for 2% of users a webpage will not look as awesome as intended (it's not guaranteed that it will be broken), that's ok. It's not poisoning - it's a 98% chance of getting a top mark.
• k2xl 4mo ago
  [dead]
• scrappy_guy 4mo ago
  And the last 2% is often the hardest part. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, so you're left with these tricky edge cases that may not have a straightforward solution.
• joshstrange 4mo ago
  > If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people. Yes, because all of us have website serving, checks notes, the entire world... 98% is probably in the neighborhood of 8% more than I'd require for browsers compatibility before deciding to use a new feature. At a certain people need to update and we do ourselves and our other 98% of customers no favors by catering to the lowest common denominator. See also, the story of YouTube adding a banner pushing people to upgrade off old IE version being a large factor in people upgrading. Now, obviously, we aren't all running YouTube-sized sites but building for ancient browsers is, very often, a large waste of time. In the age of evergreen browsers you have to go out of your way to be using something that's not at most a couple years out of date.
• 1970-01-01 4mo ago
  60% of the time, it works every time
• casey2 4mo ago
  Design bloggers are about to reinvent the concept of availability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c... Software standards are way too low these days. If you can't do at least 5 9s in everything you ship get out of the industry and humanity will be better off.
• dahart 4mo ago
  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.
• throwaw12 4mo ago
  I'm fine if you want to hand over 98% of wealth in the world, its a lot for me
• phailhaus 4mo ago
  The 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 100. You've doubled the efficacy.
  • ryan_n 4mo ago
    Isn't this pretty much the entire point of the article.
    • phailhaus 4mo ago
      Look at the HN comments and you'll see many saying they don't get the point
  • AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
    No, you've raised the efficacy from 98 to 99, which is not much of a change. What you have done is halved the inefficacy, which is a big change.
  • steadystate_eng 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  • cubefox 4mo ago
    In many cases, odds are indeed better than probabilities, namely when a small difference at the probability edges indicate a large real difference. 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.
• collinmanderson 4mo ago
  Part 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603 https://analytics.usa.gov/ 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.
  • swiftcoder 4mo ago
    Yeah, this is sort of the problem with a percentage-based approach. You are better with a "pick the top 3 implementations" in most cases - that bags you Webkit, Blink, and Gecko in the browser example, and since we're ignoring the long-tail in either case, that's probably good enough
  • criddell 4mo ago
    If they drop support of Firefox, does that mean they would actively block Firefox?
    • collinmanderson 4mo ago
      No, they would just ignore Firefox and not test against it, and might start to use chrome/safari-only features.
• devld 4mo ago
  I thought this would be about AI slop.
• greenie_beans 4mo ago
  > 98% is great for exceptionally good things, like dramatically increasing someone’s quality of life, but very low for basic expectations, like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them. this is your brain on data science. so absurd that i laughed out loud when i read "like a baby surviving a babysitter taking care of them" like what is that phrase doing in this sentence and argument
• nchmy 4mo ago
  Its 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 as someone who wants to make use of some very useful, powerful new features, but is targeting people who are most likely to have old, slow, not-updated devices...
  • bilkow 4mo ago
    There seem to be updated stats here: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart 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? Especially given how insecure it is to use outdated browsers.
    • nchmy 4mo ago
      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 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.
      • bilkow 4mo ago
        Ah you're right! You were actually very clear by saying Android 9 or below, but I misinterpreted while multitasking here, sorry for that. > 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 https://infrequently.org. Oh, haven't seen that blog before. Incredible resource, thanks! And yeah, Google, Apple, and also a situation with vendors (e.g. Qualcomm, due to drivers) that makes it so miserable. Not only due to the way they favor their stores, but also indirectly due to how hard they make to have updated or custom OSes for older devices. I believe it's a consequence of the amount of control they exert, Apple by plainly not allowing bootloader unlocking and Google by gatekeeping essential APIs (especially Play Integrity) on "secure" (read: controlled by Google) OSes. It's a bit insane that we live in two completely different realities on desktop vs mobile, where it's easy to install a current OS and browser in 15+ year old computers but can't even have an up-to-date browser on an 8 year old device, much less and up-to-date OS.
• tiborsaas 4mo ago
  It's almost as if context matters for random numbers. A 98% success rate for a parachute is criminal, but if I could achieve 98% of my goals, I couldn't be happier.
• robalni 4mo ago
  I don't like treating people like numbers. 98% isn't much and it isn't little. It's just wrong. 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.
• maderalabs 4mo ago
  I think there are broadly two types of problems - ones where you get partial credit, and ones where you don't. The restaurant example is one where you don't get partial credit - 98% of food being safe isn't enough, it's all or nothing. Paying your employees - all or nothing, you miss a paycheck once, it's a huge problem. 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".
  • m0dest 4mo ago
    Yes, the decision to rely on modern CSS is more like serving restaurant food that contains cilantro. The predominant failure mode is partial credit. The quality perception of this user segment is relative, too. That visitor who is using a version of Chrome that is 4 years stale? Their experience on the rest of the web was not pixel-perfect today. Many sites are inexplicably buggy for them. They might even be used to having to switch devices to complete some tasks. Continuing to surf the web with a long-unpatched browser is also overtly negligent [1]. That negligent 2% of users is not a protected class. As such, you might observe that this 2% of users contributes only 0.2% of revenue / engagement / value and make a self-interested decision to stop supporting them. [1] Except brief windows of time when old Apple devices continue to get Safari security updates without getting feature updates. Not relevant to the author's CSS nesting example.
• theresistor 4mo ago
  I had this argument with people working on VR headsets, where a physical parameter was designed to cover the 5th to 95th percentile. I had to point out that flat-out excluding 10% of the population is a pretty crappy starting point...
• docheinestages 4mo ago
  Feels like it's 2006 again and we're talking about IE vs Firefox.
• johannes1234321 4mo ago
  One 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.
  • cozzyd 4mo ago
    Also Firefox users are probably "power users" nowadays, which may or may not be relevant for various sites.
  • chrismorgan 4mo ago
    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.)
• s3cur3 4mo ago
  The biggest thing missing from this analysis is "is there a business case for supporting those 2% of users?". (Maybe, maybe not.) The second biggest thing is progressive enhancement. The author picked a CSS feature (nesting) that is basically all-or-nothing: the site will basically be entirely broken for those 2% if you swap Sass for native nesting. Most features aren't like that; maybe the site won't look pixel-perfect on old browsers, or one bit of functionality won't work, but by and large it will still be functional. In those cases, I think it's a much easier decision in terms of where to draw the cutoff.
• uhoh-itsmaciek 4mo ago
  Great point, but if the 2% are served graceful degradation rather than a broken site, that's probably okay.
• apexalpha 4mo ago
  Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”? Sure, it's called a 'dress code'.
• jkaptur 4mo ago
  The other thing to keep in mind is that if you have a policy of considering 98% to be "close enough", then it only takes 35 of those decisions to remove over half the population. And it'll be exceptionally difficult to work your way back up, because each improvement will be minimal! (Of course, this assumes that each decision is independent, which, when you're talking about browser support for CSS, is certainly not the case.)
• nycdotnet 4mo ago
  Space Shuttle missions returned their crew alive 98.5% of the time.
• esafak 4mo ago
  It depends on your requirements. The term that should have been mentioned is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability
• caycep 4mo ago
  Wasn't there something in statistics to describe something like this? i.e. gaussian distributions vs something that's modeled on sparse occurrences, etc?
• hei-lima 4mo ago
  That'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.
• sometimelurker 4mo ago
  I 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/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
• vikramkr 4mo ago
  If 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
• nemo1618 4mo ago
  After 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.
  • betenoire 4mo ago
    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
    • boogieknite 4mo ago
      then close my eyes to go to sleep 10 hours later and see them all again
  • dizhn 4mo ago
    It's like those antibacterial soaps that remove 99.9 percent of bacteria. It's not obvious whether that's number of bacteria or type of bacteria but either way the remaining ones are probably in the millions and of many types.
    • keane 4mo ago
      Sanitizing efficacy is total organism count. Hand sanitizers are regulated by the FDA and tested in vivo using ASTM 1174 (Health Care Personnel Handwash / HCPHW test) and ASTM 2755. E1174 tests for Serratia marcescens or Escherichia coli. E2755 tests for S. marcescens or Staphylococcus aureus. ASTM E1174-21 includes a precision and accuracy statement. The FDA explains: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/09/06/2016-21337/safety-and-effectiveness-of-consumer-antiseptics-topical-antimicrobial-drug-products-for https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/09/06/2016-21...
• amarant 4mo ago
  I 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?
• sebastianconcpt 4mo ago
  That framing is setting the question so you immediately are forced to compare pears to apples. Of course 98% of sterilization is not enough for surgery or for precision in calculating your account balance but the category of landing page conversion a 98% would be astronomically high.
• cafebabbe 4mo ago
  You can make it so those 2% are dealing with ugly -but functional- layouts it that reduces development/maintenance cost by a lot, that's not a terrible deal.
• andai 4mo ago
  On the other hand, if you design something to include 100% of people, you will fail, and you will not give your core audience as good of an experience as they could have gotten. So I like the opposite approach. If there's literally one guy on the planet, and this article/app/idea changes his life... what would that look like?
• k6hkUZtLUM 4mo ago
  Serving a website is different than serving food or providing safety features. Web design can use progressive enhancement and detect available features to use as they are available. With a website, you can have the "real" layout, but when someone is blocking your JS, you can fallback and still provide content. We won't get every mobile application working on old browsers, but we can offer something to the end user. Even a page that lets them know they are missing out. But CSS Nesting? We can have that and a fallback.
  • thesuitonym 4mo ago
    The problem is webdevs don't do that. They say "98% is fine" and then don't program any fallback, or worse, actively block users that don't meet 100% compatibility.
    • phillipcarter 4mo ago
      Probably because that extra 2% (or whatever figure) isn’t terrible valuable in the first place. Sometimes the best answer is “they’ll need to update their stuff”.
  • anoneng 4mo ago
    The whole premise of the article is fallacious analogies and mixed metaphors. Yes a restaurant that poisons 2% of its customers is a bad restaurant. A restaurant that has nothing for people who are strict kosher, strict halal, strict vegan, or have severe multiple food allergies is not a bad restaurant. There may be 5% of people who simply can’t eat there because the kitchen cooks pork and there’s peanut shells on the ground but their idiosyncratic requirements don’t dictate the experience of the other 95%. Or 90%, or what have you.
• pif 4mo ago
  The author is confusing visitors with customers. Refusing entry to 2% visitors? No, no! Forgetting about non-interesting 2% visitors? Not even a blink!
• ksec 4mo ago
  Some things are measured from 0, some are measured from 100. Depending on Expectation. When expectation is 100%, telling me 98% success rate isn't enough. An example where the argument happens on Reddit, Macrumours and even on HN. When Apple's butterfly keyboard have issues. Apple Supporter was quick to dismiss the issue and point out the double entry is such a small issue because it is working 99.9% of the time. What they don't realise keyboard before that was practically 100%. That 0.1% error rate is infinitely more than 0%. Another example is Internet connection When you are used to perfect Internet connection, just a small beep in disconnecting turns to be major annoyance. There are plenty of these examples especially with DOCSIS Cable modem. The modem theoretically is working 99,95% of the time, hence cable companies won't fix it. But Disconnecting 10 to 30 seconds every day is annoying enough. I am not sure if there is a word or terminology for it so this could be better explained to people. On the other hand, there are plenty of things where 80% is good enough, or doing above and beyond at 96% by getting 80% out of the original remaining 20%.
• throwitaway222 4mo ago
  I mean 2% have their javascript turned off (either on purpose or caused by failing extensions). 5% are behind corporate proxies that block your domain. Are you going to host the site on substack also so those 5% can access it?
• eggbrain 4mo ago
  > Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”? On the flipside, if a client enters enough venues that refuse entry to them because of something the client can fix on their end, eventually the client will probably change themselves -- "If you meet one asshole during your day" and all that. To bring the analogy back to browsers, if a website works fine for a client, they'll have no pressure to change anything on their end -- why upgrade from Windows XP when the site looks fine in IE6? Eventually the client is forced to upgrade -- normally by their operating system. That works, but what if the operating system adds another 2 years to their end of life -- do you just hang on and hope the shim / hacks you added hold?
• ninjahawk1 4mo ago
  Jesse, we need to refactor the edge cases Jesse
• ryandrake 4mo ago
  I used to try to make the point with non-tech people using the salesman analogy: If you were a salesperson who worked inbound calls from potential customers, would you be willing to handle 1 out of every 50 calls by picking up the phone, yelling "fuck you" into it, and hanging up? That's pretty much what you're doing to your customers when your software works for 98% of them.
• asxndu 4mo ago
  If a plane did not crash 98% of the time, you wouldn't step on it.
• joygqz 4mo ago
  [dead]
• system2 4mo ago
  When I read the title, I instantly thought about these crappy Ai api status pages. People somehow are forced to accept that 98% uptime is alright.
• rollulus 4mo ago
  What’s much and what isn’t depends on the context. One hair on your head isn’t much but one hair in your soup is.
• dsjoerg 4mo ago
  Decisions are about tradeoffs. 2% of users staring at a broken screen is bad, of course. But what is the _cost_ of not using nested CSS? The responsible way to make a decision is to consider both sides of the tradeoff.
• BeetleB 4mo ago
  > Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”? The web has been doing this since, when, the 90's? I use Firefox. In the last year, suddenly quite a few web sites have just stopped working on it for me. Firefox is over 2% market share.
  • inigyou 4mo ago
    That's old data? It's under 2% now.
    • BeetleB 4mo ago
      The source I checked has it above 2%. I'm looking across all platforms (desktop, mobile, etc).
• daveguy 4mo ago
  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.
• onion2k 4mo ago
  If 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.
  • mb2100 4mo ago
    This. Cannot believe it too so long for somebody to finally mention progressive enhancement.
• isolli 4mo ago
  It 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.
• compiler-guy 4mo ago
  In the early days of commercial optical-character-recognition software, vendors would brag about 99% accuracy. But a single-spaced-typewritten page has about 500 words, so you were looking at five typos every single page. It was good at the time, but you still had to manually check every single word.
• cedilla 4mo ago
  98% isn't much, but it's also not little. It's just a number, and numbers don't have a meaning without an interpretation. That's a fundamental logical feature, but hardly a special insight.
• artisin 4mo ago
  Reading the comments, I expected this blog post to be about something fundamental. But nope. It's just about native CSS nesting. A convenience feature that merely adopts functionality that preprocessors have long provided. Maybe I'm alone in this viewport, but this isn't even worth debating unless you, the developer, are the priority.
• Archer6621 4mo ago
  If that 30% of visitors with incompatible browsers has no overlap with the target audience you wish to reach, then what does it matter for your business? 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.
• dlcarrier 4mo ago
  Over the last year, only ~70% of the visiting browsers supported the new CSS features. Even thought this feature is “widely supported” in a general audience, for my audience, it left out 30% of the visitors. That mirrors my experience using web pages to order things. They work ~70% of the time. Often while I sit there repeatedly pressing a 'buy' button that does nothing, or playing around with my browser's development tools to try and fix it client side, I wonder how often physical stores cash registers fail, in comparison. Just yesterday I tried to order from a site called buttonworks.com, but the order page only worked in Firefox, and the account/payment pages only worked in Chrome, and I gave up on trying to copy cookies from one browser to another and went with purebuttons.com.
  • inigyou 4mo ago
    Stripe payment somehow gets Firefox into an infinite loop for me. Have to kill the process and try again in Chrome.
• ClumsyPilot 4mo ago
  This is a basic ontological error, author conflates reliability and suitability >> If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population >> If an employer pays their employees 98% of the times, I definitely wouldn’t want to work there Are you sure about that? 2% of the population has no bank account, will your employer agree to pay in cash? These are different scenarios -> your employer likely cannot pay some percentage of the population; but that’s not the same as the process randomly failing (which may be worse or better depending in some cases)
• groby_b 4mo ago
  "Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases" Not really. Truly robust engineering includes a cost-benefit analysis of which edge cases you handle. We don't live in a world of unlimited time & money.
• tombert 4mo ago
  When I had appendicitis seven years ago, I went to the emergency room, found out I would need surgery, and was (I think understandably) scared. I texted a friend about that while I was waiting and he, trying to make me feel better, said something like "Dude, appendectomies are pretty routine, there's probably like a 99% survival rate" for them. That that did not make me feel better. If I asked you to guess a number between 1 and 100, and you guessed corrected, I would only be a little impressed. 1 in 100 things happen all the time! Obviously, I didn't die, and it worked out pretty routinely, but I always think about that particular situation when I hear about things being "98% successful".
• crudgen 4mo ago
  The problem I encounter more frequently is: Advertised number is high %, then after considering all risks and terms and conditions it is sub average.
• rvba 4mo ago
  It feels as if OP independently invented the concept of six sigma. Six sigma is a bit cultish, but overall the concept is quite clear - quality. 98% in a restaurant is horrible, because restaurants usually issue more than 100 meals per day. So 2% rate would mean a problem every day. Although usually the distribution here would be different 98 good days and 2 bad where hundreds get food posioning..
• tedggh 4mo ago
  When you work on high availability, mission critical systems, 99.99% uptime is unacceptable. That’s a full hour of downtime in a calendar year.
• amai 4mo ago
  2/100 isn't little.
• trencedamp 4mo ago
  > Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”? Actually this happens a lot more than you'd think. Every time renovations are done without consideration for wheelchair users, it's basically an improved experience that denies a percentage of people access
• csours 4mo ago
  98% of any particular audience at a live event is well behaved. Unfortunately, in an audience of 1,000 people, that means 20 people are not well behaved, and if each of those 20 people ruins the event for their neighbors, that means at least 200 people had a bad time. If 2% of your users complain and leave bad reviews, and only 1% leave good reviews...
  • ozim 4mo ago
    They can't leave bad reviews if they cannot use your website ... 5D chess move.
• ericyd 4mo ago
  What a useless observation. "Metrics are different when applied to different things."
• shimman 4mo ago
  Weird rant, unless they meant it as a anti-corporate screed against how openly hostile US technology has become to western democracies. Definitely didn't read as that way.
• jimrandomh 4mo ago
  If you think a browser feature that's been standard since 2023 is only supported by 70% of your visitors, you're wrong. The 30% of "users" that don't support it aren't visitors, they're bots pretending to be browsers. Bots update their user-agent strings less often than users update their browsers. My experience maintaining firewall rules is that "outdated version of an evergreen browser" is a pretty reliable bot signal: those UAs correlate strongly with all of the other bot indicators (inhumanly high request rates, datacenter IPs, loading pages without loading the page's associated resources, etc).
• topaz0 4mo ago
  Log odds ratios are less misleading. Or at least odds ratios.
• hahajk 4mo ago
  Related: Science is a strong-link problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35712694 Things like lottery tickets are "strong link" problems (the system's value equals the strongest link's value); food safety is a "weak link" problem (the safety of a meal equals the least safe bite of food). It appears that the author is advocating for "weak link" standards for CSS (it matters more what the vast majority see, knocking it out of the park once or twice won't make up for the failures)
• ggm 4mo ago
  I enjoyed reading the acceptable food contamination levels relating to rodent feces, Insects, bone, set by the FDA. Likewise anyone with anaphlaxis in themselves or family will be familiar with the risk equation of "may contain" distinct from simple food adulteration: May contain is probably safer than some random restaurant using "cumin" which has nuts in it as a cheap substitution up the supply chain with no declaration.
• rgovostes 4mo ago
  A website dedicated to promoting LASIK says the surgery “boasts a success rate of at least 96%”, and a satisfaction rate of 95%. “Long-term or chronic dry eye affects only a small minority (about 4%)” while cases requiring follow-up treatments are “typically under 5%”. These numbers have never been particularly reassuring to me.
• hamilyon2 4mo ago
  2% of country's people working together is a successful revolution
• stefan_lec 4mo ago
  I’m a bit skeptical of the accuracy of the traffic data claimed in this article, 30% of users not being able to use baseline widely available features is a suspiciously large number. Unless this is a very unique set of users, I doubt that it is accurate. Maybe bot traffic messing up the data? For context, baseline widely available requires that your browser have updated at some point in 2023, which happens automatically for almost all users. For mobile devices, any device that supports Android >= 7.0 or iOS >= 17 would meet this requirement. Chrome even supported Windows 7 through Feb 2023, too. According to this: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/mobile-os-market-share-2026-ios-vs-android#ios-version-distribution https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/mobile-os-market-share-2... * iOS >= 17.0 covers 95% of global active iOS devices * Android >= 7.0 covers at least 99% of global active Android devices It seems reasonable to me to drop support for Windows XP, IE, and phones that are a decade or more old (iPhone 8, Galaxy S5). And if you claim to be supporting stuff that old, but you don’t test your site on it, you’re just kidding yourself. You have to draw the line somewhere.