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Show HN: Get pinged when standards hit 90% browser support

199 points| AlexMuir | 11 years ago |frontendhq.com | reply

48 comments

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[+] AlexMuir|11 years ago|reply
I built this over the weekend because browser support is a moving feast. I'd find myself exploring SVG, thinking "That's great - I can't wait to use it." And then not noticing that there is basically 95% support now.
[+] davezatch|11 years ago|reply
Very cool. Signed up. I often find myself looking at technologies and thinking "Oh, I'll use that someday," then forgetting about them.

Feature request: Allow user to set minimum required browser support more granularly, e.g. 'IE>9 && 90%', kind of like how https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer does

[+] jahnu|11 years ago|reply
Great idea. I wonder if there is public data making a ping by market segment possible too. For example I have to maintain a web app which is aimed at corporate users thus our current baseline is "it has to work in IE8 but it's allowed to look ugly until IE10" so if some sample of usage by IPs owned by known businesses fell below a certain threshold I could be informed.
[+] primitivesuave|11 years ago|reply
This is so cool, I had a similar idea when Yo came out (a Yo app that Yo's you when there are changes in web standards and adoption rates). This implementation is great and very straightforward!
[+] the_imp|11 years ago|reply
In addition to email, could you provide an RSS feed as well?
[+] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
This is probably a rather unpopular position among web developers, but please don't let your desire for the new and shiny get in the way of making the content on your site widely accessible. I've seen quite a few sites turned from simple and easily readable to complex, slow-loading and irritatingly gimmicky because the developers felt like putting in all the bells and whistles they could.
[+] eloisant|11 years ago|reply
Sometimes it's the other way around.

Designer wants a specific effect anyway, and switching from an ugly Javascript/jQuery implementation to a simple (but recent) CSS rule can greatly improve accessibility and performances.

[+] klum|11 years ago|reply
Of course, and there are a bunch of beautifully designed websites consisting mostly of text and images where scrolling is laggy even on a modern computer. On the other hand, new features in HTML, CSS and JS occasionally let you replace a complex, slow-loading and irritatingly gimmicky workaround with simple, clean code :).
[+] sondr3|11 years ago|reply
Anything over 90% is good enough for me personally, I can't be bothered to not use recent features in CSS/HTML because IE>9 us god awful and Opera Mini doesn't support it.
[+] jlebrech|11 years ago|reply
maybe it's not just useful for the now.

it could tell you in 5 years time to tweak a few things.

[+] thameera|11 years ago|reply
This is pretty useful!

As an aside, please consider sending a confirmation email to the address and subscribing only afterwards.

[+] CyberShadow|11 years ago|reply
...why? Send an email to confirm that it should send one more email?
[+] klum|11 years ago|reply
Cool! Any possibility you'll add an RSS feed in the future? (Unless there is one and I missed it)
[+] jscheel|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure "user-select: none" is "2 days away." I shudder to think about the hacks I've done to make it work. My favorite is capturing clicks on an overlay, then translating the click point to where it needs to be and simulating a new click with the modified values on the underlying layer, which also happened to be in an iframe. I still get shivers.
[+] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
I'm curious what you're trying to do. That rule sounds like it would be perfect for causing the same sort of irritation as the "disable right-click" and "disable copy-paste" scripts that were popular years ago.
[+] martin-adams|11 years ago|reply
I'm confused. Is this if it is supported by 90% of browsers, or 90% of global traffic?

What might be interesting here is using my own web site traffic to know whether 90% of my visitors will be supported. A simple transparent GIF should be enough to send the UA to an analytics server (or use Google Analytics)

[+] encoderer|11 years ago|reply
> A simple transparent GIF should be enough to send the UA to an analytics server (or use Google Analytics)

That's a hell of a scope creep.

[+] AlexMuir|11 years ago|reply
90% of global browsers.

I believe you can import your Google Analytics data into http://caniuse.com for this depth of information.

[+] Aardwolf|11 years ago|reply
What browsers are considered in this percentage?

If 27 (lots of obscure) browsers support it, but 3 major ones (e.g. chrome, firefox, ie) don't, is it considered 90%?

[+] ZeroGravitas|11 years ago|reply
Knowing when it "works", including polyfills and graceful degradation, is more useful, but may involve more human input to decide.

(The country you target can have a big impact on support numbers too, due to differences in browser usage)

[+] janpieterz|11 years ago|reply
Very cool, always been a bit of a struggle. I know this has been mentioned slightly before, but what about making this data intersect with the traffic usage.

I know this could make it very difficult but maybe combining a couple of sources with summarized data can be relatively easy and one can have a "get pinged when standards hit 90% of internet usage"

[+] Everhusk|11 years ago|reply
I find it an odd coincidence that both CSS3 Animations and CSS3 Transitions hit 90% support in the same week (both pretty major features).

It seems unlikely that a large percentage of people decided to update their browsers simultaneously. Is there another way features can gain browser support that I am missing?

[+] sukilot|11 years ago|reply
They both launched in the same browser version of a major browser?

Updated measurement methodology gave them both a boost?

[+] EGreg|11 years ago|reply
This is a great idea! Useful to us :)