[kg]

Yes. That is exactly how web standards work historically. If something will break 0.1% of the web it isn't done unless there are really really strong reasons to do it anyway. I personally watched lots of things get bounced due to their impact on a very small % of all websites.

This is part of why web standards processes need to be very conservative about what's added to the web, and part of why a small vocal contingent of web people are angry that Google keeps adding all sorts of weird stuff to the platform. Useful weird stuff, but regardless.

[WhitneyLand]

“That is exactly how web standards work…”

Says who? You keep mentioning this 0.1% threshold yet…

1. I can’t find any reference to that do you have examples / citations?

2. On the contrary here’s a paper that proposes a 3x higher heuristic: https://arianamirian.com/docs/icse2019_deprecation.pdf

3. It seems there are plenty of examples of features being removed above that threshold NPAPI/SPDY/WebSQL/etc.

4. Resources are finite. It’s not a simple matter of who would be impacted. It’s also opportunity cost and people who could be helped as resources are applied to other efforts.

[troupo]

E.g. Google said in their document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

--- start quote ---

As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly!

--- end quote ---

Read the full doc. They even give examples when they couldn't remove a feature impacting just 0.0000008% of web views.