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Comment by boffinism | Hacker News Reader

Lovely... but works in < 90% of browsers [0], so it's kind of for academic consideration only for now.

For browsers that support grid you can use grid and then have a fallback layout for browsers that don't. You can even user `@supports(display: grid)` feature query to specifically target browsers that support grid.

Or just use the fallback, and code once instead of twice.

> works in < 90% of browsers [0], so it's kind of for academic consideration only for now.

Says your particular organizations policies, why is the line drawn at 90%, why not 95%? Is this restriction based on calculations or was it simply arbitrarily chosen?

If it's arbitrary, allow me to offer an alternative, focus support only on "modern generation" browsers which auto-update by default. All popular browsers adopted auto-updates as a collective effort to improve end-user security, and so as web developers we're able to encourage this by only supporting those platforms.

As you can see on caniuse, grid support on those modern browser platforms is 100%. The only ones lacking are IE which microsoft has abandoned, and Opera Mini (I can't speak good or bad about that, I haven't examined it).

The idea that you must support as many browsers as possible is a relic of the 1990s dot com bubble when it was unclear which browser was best and there were no agreed upon standards. It's now 2018 and you're either using Firefox or Chrome and to a much smaller extent, Edge or Safari. Any other browser that wants to be taken seriously is going to support the standards set by those platforms.

If you're a business with actual customers, your decision about which browsers to support and where to draw the line is going to be driven by whether not supporting them costs more money than supporting them, not by whether the dev team would prefer people to download software worth taking seriously or buy a newer phone if they wish to continue being customers.

> The idea that you must support as many browsers as possible is a relic of the 1990s dot com bubble

Your notion of forcing people to change browsers (who may not be able to for accessibility reasons, corporate policy reasons, or hardware reasons) is the real relic of the 1990's.

Remember when half the web sites you'd visit put up a big notice "Your browser is not supported. Download the latest browser here?"

Non-support is the relic. Support is what makes a business work.

The customer's money is still green, even if they're not using the latest tech.

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