alt Hacker NewsGoing back 2 versions, only ~50% of Chrome users are on v140 or newer. If you go back another 2 versions, that number increases to around ~66%. Going back another 2 versions only increases that to 68%, with no huge gains from each further 2 step jump. That you think your target gives you 98% coverage is concerning for the state of web developers, to say the least.
After checking further, almost 20% of Chrome users are on a 2+ year old version. If you handle that gracefully by polyfilling etc., fine. If you "simply ignore" and shut out 20% of users (or 50% of users per your own admission of support target), as I have encountered in the wild countless times, you are actively detrimental to your business and would probably be fired if the people in charge of your salary knew what you were doing, especially since these new browser features are very rarely mission-critical.
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Note that the comma in browserlist queries are OR. So if any given browser version still has > 0.2% usage, it is included. This would include Chrome 109 which is three year old. Meaning developers with this browswerlist target would fail their static analysis / peer review (actually even a more reasonable > 0.5% still fails on Chrome 109) if they used a feature which Chrome 109 doesn’t support without graceful degradation or polyfill.
Furthermore the "baseline widely available" target (which IMO is a much better target and will probably become the recommendation pretty soon) includes versions of the popular browsers going back 30 months, meaning a competent team of web devs with a qualified QA process should not deliver software which won‘t work on your 2 year old browser.
I can‘t speak for the developers of the websites which break on your 2 year old browser... Maybe they don‘t have a good QA process. Or maybe you were visiting somebodies hobby project (personally I only target "baseline newly available" in my own hobby projects; as I am coding mostly for my own amusement). But I think it is a reasonable assumption that user tend to update their browsers every 30 months, and you won‘t loose too many customers if you occasionally brake things for the users which don’t.
Can you link to the source for your stats?
I'm not finding anything to corroborate that -- I'm seeing stats suggesting things like 90% of Chrome users are on the newest version after two weeks:
https://timotijhof.net/posts/2023/browser-adoption/
And Stat Counter shows that the current version of Chrome utterly dominates in any given month:
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share/desk...
The glacial adoption you're describing doesn't make much sense when you consider how aggressively Chrome auto-updates, so I'm quite confused.