Can I use caniuse with my own dataset?!

Caniuse.com is a precious resource for web developers who need to know whether or not an acceptable percentage of their audience will be able to view their company’s fancy WebGL 3D animations. One shortcoming however had been that your audience’s software and everyone’s software could be totally different, as is the case with us.

Rather than just relying on Caniuse’s global data, now you may easily import your own sites’ Google Analytics data in order to determine how much of your audience can support a feature while still comparing it to the global usage data and even all your other websites.

I just blew your mind.

I’ll give you an example. We’d like to speed the site up, and one brilliant way to do that is with the srcset attribute which would enable us to let the browsers pick which size image to download based on what’s appropriate for the device. A responsive web design thing. Still with me?

The problem with caniuse for my use case is that we get more Microsoft browser traffic because, sadly, that’s often what we write about, even though Google is better and more interesting. Not a problem anymore! With a couple clicks I was able to see how much of our audience (based on last month’s traffic Google Analytics picked up) could take advantage of this srcset thing.

While globally 2/3rds of web surfers would be able to take advantage of the feature, only 57% of our audience would be able to. Two thirds, okay that’s enough to make it worthwhile, but 57%? Nope. Instead I’ll hunt down and another feature Google released in 2007 that Microsoft finally implemented. Try it yourself with or without your own data. Short screenshot walk-through below. Thanks caniuse!

Doug Simmons

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