Former 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.

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).

That 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.

Unfortunately 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.

Browsers 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.

I like how you equate 10 year old browser users with luddites?

It'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.

Most managers I've had preached the "80/20" rule, so 80% was good enough.

I’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.

It 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.

There'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.

That'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.

This 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.

Plenty for who/what? I think you've assumed a bunch of facts that aren't true for every situation.

If your business plan is selling software to people, 98% is not plenty at all.

If your web app crashes one out of every fifty times I launch it, it's not good. The business side of things is reasonable to prioritize right up until it isn't.

For 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.

or if your business plan needs to dedicate 2% of your earnings to litigation from the problems it causes.

Yes, 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.