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Yeah, when I read the article I thought "Great, more paternalistic advice that pretends we have infinite resources/time/money." Anyone who has ever done websit

Yeah, when I read the article I thought "Great, more paternalistic advice that pretends we have infinite resources/time/money." Anyone who has ever done website or mobile development knows there is a huge array of browsers and platforms, and supporting the very long tail of configurations is sometimes nearly impossible, let alone almost never cost effective. When I last ran some web apps, we'd see substantial numbers 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 4mo ago
He 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 4mo ago
  Except 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 4mo ago
    Isn'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 4mo ago
  Yeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking. Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes. Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue. His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website. Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - godelski 4mo ago
    I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!! The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars. The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues
    - Eridrus 4mo ago
      He is saying the most inane things ever, I don't know why I need to be charitable here.
  - zem 4mo ago
    imagine not 2% of users not being able to use the site, but any given user not being able to use the site 2% of the time, and see if that changes the calculus for you.
    - Dylan16807 4mo ago
      Yeah, that changes it, in both positive and negative ways. I can't tell if this is in support of the article or not though.
- s3p 4mo ago
  I mean the name was "98% isn't much" and the article made it sound like 98% isn't good enough
- dpark 4mo ago
  98% of HN commenters reply to the interpretation of the article they feel most capable of arguing against, which is usually the least charitable one.
ryandrake 4mo ago
Respectfully: To me these just sound like excuses. I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much of anything, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? Obviously, it's a trade-off, and no final product is going to work on 100% of configurations. All these choices deliberately made during development add up to the product you deliver at the end of the day. All I'm asking is that we recognize browser/platform incompatibility/inaccessibility as choices and not some inherent property of software. When a developer says "it's too expensive to develop this for a dozen configurations" that just means they have already chosen to make their applications inaccessible, and are justifying it after the fact.
- anoneng 4mo ago
  This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.
  - drdeca 4mo ago
    Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ? I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites should reach 100%, only that they should start from there and sacrifice only as much as is necessary.
    - autoexec 4mo ago
      > I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.

throwaway173738 4mo ago

He 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 4mo ago
Except 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 4mo ago
  Isn'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 4mo ago
Yeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking. Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes. Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue. His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website. Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- godelski 4mo ago
  I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!! The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars. The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues
  - Eridrus 4mo ago
    He is saying the most inane things ever, I don't know why I need to be charitable here.
- zem 4mo ago
  imagine not 2% of users not being able to use the site, but any given user not being able to use the site 2% of the time, and see if that changes the calculus for you.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    Yeah, that changes it, in both positive and negative ways. I can't tell if this is in support of the article or not though.
s3p 4mo ago
I mean the name was "98% isn't much" and the article made it sound like 98% isn't good enough
dpark 4mo ago
98% of HN commenters reply to the interpretation of the article they feel most capable of arguing against, which is usually the least charitable one.

ryandrake 4mo ago

Respectfully: To me these just sound like excuses. I can write a web page that works correctly on all browsers. We all can. That web page won't do much of anything, but it's possible. So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage. From there, it's purely developer choice: When you add something, are you choosing technology that is widely available and supported, or are you choosing to throw 0.N% of users under the bus for some benefit (development speed/comfort)? Obviously, it's a trade-off, and no final product is going to work on 100% of configurations. All these choices deliberately made during development add up to the product you deliver at the end of the day. All I'm asking is that we recognize browser/platform incompatibility/inaccessibility as choices and not some inherent property of software. When a developer says "it's too expensive to develop this for a dozen configurations" that just means they have already chosen to make their applications inaccessible, and are justifying it after the fact.

anoneng 4mo ago
This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.
- drdeca 4mo ago
  Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ? I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites should reach 100%, only that they should start from there and sacrifice only as much as is necessary.
  - autoexec 4mo ago
    > I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.