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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
by wccrawford 3mo 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 3mo agoI like how you equate 10 year old browser users with luddites?
- bradleybuda 3mo agoIt’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 3mo agoOr 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 3mo agoThere 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.
- lukasbm 3mo agoI am an expert and half the internet does not work. That's just the way things are
- zarzavat 3mo agoIt's fine to support such configurations by accident, but you shouldn't try to support them intentionally. You will end up dropping support eventually regardless but the skeletons will live on in your codebase as tech debt. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
- ben_w 3mo agoWhile I agree with your general gist and definitely your final paragraph, > There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers. How many people have 10 year old phones? I've got an 8 year old iPhone XR which I keep around as a backup/travel device because it's not worth selling, and the battery is… not happy even in airplane mode. For me to have a 10 year old mobile browser, I'd have to have kept the iPhone SE 1 (or was it a 5c?) that I bought second hand in 2018, and not upgraded it since I bought it. I got rid of it because the battery wouldn't hold a charge for 10 minutes.
- autoexec 3mo agoI have a 10 year old cell phone that still gets regular use. Works just fine for things like phone calls, texts, youtube (newpipe), termux, and note taking. Original battery isn't great at this point, but a new one is maybe $15. Zero reason to replace it.
- mattmatheus 3mo agoI'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.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoYou get the guy at the mall to swap in a new battery for $50 in most parts of the world. Its cheaper to do that every few years than buy a new phone, and I have several family members who refuse to upgrade on principle, because modern phones grew too large for their hands/pockets
- mananaysiempre 3mo agoThere’s also being poor, or working for an organization that’s poor. In both cases the obsolete(?) software might be various degrees of intentional, but the alternative is usually worse anyway.
- jollyllama 3mo agoThat's a choice by the people who make websites and browsers that forces the average person to buy a new computer. If we all cared about letting people use old computers, this wouldn't be the case.
- esrauch 3mo agoI wouldn't conflate old computers and old browsers. I still use an over 10 year old laptop and it still has a latest browser.
- anoneng 3mo agoRight. That problem is bloat, not lack of legacy support. Adding (already bloated) legacy support to already bloated software just makes bloat worse.
- intrasight 3mo agoI doubt that for the hackernews audience that the age of the browsers is an issue. I would say in practice that 90% is nowhere near what is achieved - that it's closer to 90% and amongst the hackernews audience probably lucky if it gets to 50% because of our use of anti-tracking and ad blockers.
- swiftcoder 3mo agoRespectfully, you may live in a bubble of fairly tech-savvy folks. Most of my extended family run 10+ year old laptops as their daily drivers. Their phones are often on the second or third battery replacement. They don't install updates very often (if at all). For the most part they are still more proficient with tech than many of their peers.
- Dylan16807 3mo ago> They don't install updates very often (if at all). The average person with zero tech savvy has their browser updating itself regularly with no input from the user. Are they escaping that?
- compiler-guy 3mo agoI support a bevy of older people with older computers, senior-citizen types. Upgrades are expensive. Monetarily, but also in retraining. These folks don't want the latest UI, they want what is familiar, and retraining is super annoying. Computers that were EOL a few years ago, running ten-year-old browsers, are absolutely routine.
- pixl97 3mo agoWell, being these days that a browser over 5 minutes old probably has a security flaw, it's not much of a reach.
- jawilson2 3mo agoHa, I had the same thought, if you actually know the history of Luddites vs the more colloquial usage of "someone who hates all technology."
- __alexs 3mo agoThe same way people generally equate luddism with anything. By entirely misunderstanding what it was to make a point that sounds snappy without all of that boring understanding history stuff.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- itake 3mo agoUnfortunately 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.
- mmmattt 3mo agoYeah 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.
- mrhottakes 3mo agoThat's what a lot of people would call a "bad business decision"
- igsomething 3mo agoFor 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.
- account42 3mo agoYou you can make a law that requires such businesses to use perfectly good technology standards that are widely supported instead of whatever EEE crap the latest Chrome comes with.
- abofh 3mo agoI remember years ago when websites would have buttons "best viewed in Internet explorer 4.0". We're past those days, but only because it's implied "use chrome, maybe webkit, we didn't test on Firefox"
- igsomething 3mo agoI agree, but one thing is to demand all your users to be on the latest Chrome, and another one is to support browsers that are no longer maintained and contain security issues (IE). If we discourage people from driving old insecure cars, we can also discourage people from using old insecure browsers.
- ngriffiths 3mo agoIt's also super easy to apply it wrong because going above X% in one area normally means sinking below X% in another. I think a clearer way to say it is that sometimes, you have to be almost perfect, and 98% could sound like almost perfect but it's way too low. But definitely the things you don't need to be perfect far outnumber the ones you do.
- miltonlost 3mo agoYes, the article discusses how 98% is good in context and bad in others. You just... restated the article but reversed the premise, resulting in an overly optimistic yet anti-social framing.
- rafterydj 3mo agoIf 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.
- bell-cot 3mo ago> 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.
- steego 3mo agoI’ll go even further. Sometimes you want to give certain people an incentive to not be your customers because your company would be entirely better off if they were someone else’s customer.
- robalni 3mo agoThis is not just a question of browser age. I use a browser that had its last release less than a year ago. It doesn't do CSS, it doesn't do javascript and I love it. I also love to be able to use the websites I need.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoMost managers I've had preached the "80/20" rule, so 80% was good enough.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoYeah, 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).
- throwaway173738 3mo agoHe 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.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoExcept there was 0 analysis of the cost/benefit of supporting the end of the long tail, instead it was just economics-free shaming. Of course, you want to see who those 2% of users actually are. But nowhere in this article did I find any advice I'd actually want to use in a really business scenario.
- godelski 3mo agoIsn't the end of the article saying that their users are mainly in that tail? Seems to be exactly what you say: figuring out who those 2% are. In the OP's case, it's 30% of their users
- Eridrus 3mo ago
- dataviz1000 3mo agoFormer 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.
- explodingwaffle 3mo agoman, HN is awesome
- Tarq0n 3mo agoThat's a very mercenary attitude. If less than 2% of your (potential) users had a particular disability, would you implement accessibility features for them without being forced to? I'd argue that it's the right thing to do. Some restrictions like using an old browser may be more or less a choice, but it's still a much better look to be inclusive.
- pavon 3mo agoThat is neglecting network effects. Less than 10% of the US population is vegetarian, but if a restaurant doesn't have any vegetarian options they lose business not just from that 10% but from any party that has a single vegetarian. Likewise, if a website has any social network effect, disregarding a portion of the population will decrease use from a much larger percentage than those directly affected. Furthermore, even if your site functionality has no social networking component itself, all business are subject to the network effects of word of mouth. People are much more likely to share negative experiences that positive ones, so if 1/50 of people find your site to be broken, then a considerable amount of feedback online will be negative and will harm your reputation for the entire market, not just that 2%. Finally, in business you have to work hard to win over even a small portion of your total addressable market. Artificially decreasing your TAM can be fine if it is an intentional strategic decision to focus on a specific market, but pointless to exclude people without good reason. Not having vegetarian options at BBQ restaurant in Texas is harmless - no one goes there for that, but if you are running a more general restaurant it would be foolish not to have a few vegetarian options. Excluding people because your web developers are too lazy to use approaches that have worked fine for the last 20 years and need to use the new shiny is even more foolish.
- mrhottakes 3mo agoPlenty for who/what? I think you've assumed a bunch of facts that aren't true for every situation.
- dheera 3mo agoFor 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.
- cyanydeez 3mo agoor if your business plan needs to dedicate 2% of your earnings to litigation from the problems it causes.
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- inigyou 3mo agoIt may be a different 2% every time. Eventually you can cover 100% of your users with 2% 50 times, and 100% of your users will feel your software only works 98% of the time. You can get a reputation as an unreliable vendor. That can happen but it's usually not that extreme. But you should think about it. Negative reputation spreads faster than positive. And if your software already supports something then all you have to do is not break it. That's usually easier than making it work then first time.
- HWR_14 3mo agoThere's no reason code complexity or engineering time has to increase. You can just use the older version features everywhere instead of forking the supported versions.
- jeremyjh 3mo agoBrowsers have been good enough for pretty much every reasonable purpose for more than 10 years, and compatibility has been really good for that long as well. Is it really challenging or costly to support a feature set that old? In 2017 an app I built worked on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge without any effort or testing other than on Chrome. It still supports all those. At that time, there were probably more than 2% IE users on the general internet but this was B2B. Just a couple of up-front choices regarding css frameworks and polyfill libraries were all that was required to do that. I'm open to believing it could be costly for some projects, but I'm more inclined to believe its mostly chasing FOTM, ignorance and laziness that leads to < 98% support.