alt Hacker NewsI usually go by CanIUse's global percentage when deciding if I can utilize a new browser feature, and right now it's 90.81% (https://caniuse.com/css-nesting)
That's a bit lower than I would be comfortable with, however not that bad, we have been even considering switching all our images to AVIF: https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF
And google uses Webp all over the place and that's sitting at 96% https://caniuse.com/webp
Author's 98% take is a bit misguided.
Replies
The author doesn't say you can't use features with 98% (or even less) support.
What they say is that you have to ensure that your site still works for the remaining users, through graceful degradation.
If people have new fancy browsers, use their features to make the interface jazzy. If they don't, ensure that the site still offers its core functionality to them without the fancy features.
It's really easy to serve fallback images to browsers that don't support AVIF, either client-side using the <picture> tag or server-side via the Accept header. Which mostly eliminates the concern from the article, since you don't have to drop support for any customers.
It kind of makes me wonder if anyone has made a build system / framework that serves nested CSS to modern browsers, and falls back to a preprocessed CSS file that removes all the nesting for older browsers.
For anyone who didn't know, caniuse lets you upload your actual usage data. Then for any capability, next to global support you also see the stats for your user-base.
Haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure Google falls back on older browsers.
Be careful with new image formats because they also have to be supported by the rest of the user's workflow. The browser might display it, but if it cannot be added to the photos app, or it's not understood by their image editor, or cannot be shared on their preferred chat app, then that's a fail.
WebP is especially hated for this among non-techies (31.8k upvotes, 1 month ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1trpuvr/...
Global statistics don't matter. What matters is current & potential visitors to your site. And how badly you want them served.
A professional B2B car parts dealer has a very different user profile than say, a local news site in rural Africa.
A site selling concert tickets (for popular artist) probably won't care if site doesn't work for 5% of visitors, the tickets will just take a bit longer to sell out.
But otoh I'm sure there's many businesses out there who wouldn't mind a 2..5% bump in conversion ratio for very little effort.
Personally I don't care. If I'm out to buy something online & webshop doesn't work or takes too long to load, my purchase goes elsewhere.
And ofc government services should be very conservative in this respect.
Edit: and yes, graceful degradation. It's ok if site doesn't look as intended but is still useable for that 2%. And eg. I love that some news site have a text-only lite version.