98% isn't much

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• Hacker News
• 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.

  by johannes1234321
• Also Firefox users are probably "power users" nowadays, which may or may not be relevant for various sites.
  by cozzyd
• 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but not solely on Statcounter) are lousy and unrealistic due to some of these sorts of issues, and just generally being out of date.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.)

  by chrismorgan
• 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.

  by robalni
• 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...

  by nchmy
• There seem to be updated stats here: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart

  Which seems to indicate about 4.8% are below Android 9.

  But also, Firefox for Android still supports Android 8, of which there are 1.7% below.

  There's a discussion to be made here about who is dropping support for these users, is it Google (and especially Apple, who doesn't allow other browsers on iOS) or the site owner? Especially given how insecure it is to use outdated browsers.

  by bilkow
• 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.

  by mewpmewp2
• 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.

  by account42
• 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://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.

  by collinmanderson
• If they drop support of Firefox, does that mean they would actively block Firefox?
  by criddell
• 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
  by swiftcoder
• 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".

  by maderalabs
• 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.

  by m0dest
• 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

  by Aachen
• Doesn't Aldi work against that theory?
  by doublepg23
• 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
  by msephton
• Isn't 誘惑 more like “allure, temptation, seduction”?
  by TazeTSchnitzel
• Greatest thing I’ve learned today. Thank you.
  by phishin
• 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.
  by phailhaus
• Isn't this pretty much the entire point of the article.
  by ryan_n
• 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.
  by AnimalMuppet
• Tangentially, but 5-day vs 4-day workweek is somewhat similar. You've not only reduced your working days by 20%, but you've also increased your days off by 50%.
  by abustamam
• 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.

  by cubefox
• It's contextual depending on which end of the probability is the desired outcome.

  SPF is like this. SPF 30 allows 1/30th (3%) of the UV through it, blocking 29/30ths (97%). SPF 50 (2%) allows 1/50th, blocking 49/50ths (98%). Using the denominator, in this case, expressed the efficacy much more intuitively.

  Comparing SPF 30 vs 50 better expresses the increase in efficacy than 97% vs 98% does.

  One could also express it as the amount that passes the filter but it is Sun _Protection_ Factor not Sun _Transparency_ Factor.

  by parineum
• 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.
  by nemo1618
• 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
  by betenoire
• 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.
  by dizhn
• In some cases (like this), 99.99% isn't enough. 100% is mandatory.

  I moved into my house a few months ago and while I was exercising my foot discovered a nail that I guess was left by the previous homeowner/tenant/builder. Fortunately it was just a scratch, but it could have easily turned into a trip to the ER.

  With a baby learning to walk and crawl, the tolerance for cleaning up nails on the floor is absolutely 100% (or 0% nail) so I scoured the entire house carpet with a strong magnet to ensure there no other surprises. I did this several times just to make sure

  This was a few months ago and yet I still tend to have anxiety when walking on the carpet now.

  by abustamam
• 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.

  by MatekCopatek
• Yea, when this topic comes up on HN, a lot of the usual excuses appear: It's hard to write software that works everywhere! It takes too long to test on more than one browser! It's too expensive to hire someone to port to X platform! We're trying to bootstrap in a hurry--there's no time to support Y people! Everybody should just upgrade to the latest, why should we test on older systems?

  These are attitudes come from the privilege of never having been in that 2% of users, and I think we have them until that one day we end up being in that 2% and can't use the system ourselves.

  When I wrote iOS apps, I was constantly infuriated by the tech lead's and product management's insistence to only support the current major OS version and the previous one. Engineers would take time out of their day to rip out support for iOS X-2 (rather than fixing bugs, working on performance or features)! Code that wasn't in the way of refactors, wasn't really buggy, wasn't harming anything architecturally. To me, it just looked like Griefing The User. I didn't get it and I still don't. Now, I have a 8 year old phone, and lo and behold, half of the apps in the AppStore don't even work on it anymore because of this attitude, so I guess I'm firmly in the 2%.

  by ryandrake