Choosing A Baseline That Fits Your Project

One of the persistent frictions in web development is deciding when to use a new platform feature. Every adoption decision is shadowed by the same clutter of questions: How recently did this ship? Which browser versions support it? Will it break for our users if we pull the trigger today?

Baseline was designed to cut through that noise by offering developers concrete support targets. Rather than maintaining a mental matrix of browser versions and release dates, you pick a Baseline target that reflects your project's requirements and your audience's reality. That shifts the conversation away from version-by-version compatibility checks and towards what the feature landscape actually looks like for the people who will run your code.

There's no single correct choice. You might aim for the moving Baseline Widely available target if your users skew mainstream, or you might adopt a narrower target that allows you to use newer capabilities, provided you accept the trade-offs in coverage. The right pick depends on your own product needs—which means figuring out what those are in the first place.

Baseline Wide support

Locating Your Baseline

We’re running an awareness campaign this month to see which Baseline target teams land on, and we want you to roll up your sleeves and determine yours. Here's the workflow:

  1. Start with the guide on choosing a Baseline target, which lays out how the decision process should be structured.
  2. Use whatever data you have—for many, that will mean your own analytics and the Google Analytics Baseline checker tool—to find the target that strikes the right balance between how many of your users you cover and the modern features you want to adopt.
  3. If Google Analytics isn't your setup, you can build your own tooling using the data you have. You can map your users' browsers against Baseline targets with the npm package baseline-browser-mapping, a package that the Google Analytics Baseline checker tool uses itself to perform just this kind of analysis.
  4. If you don't have analytics handy at all, you can fall back on the aggregate user data that RUM Archive publishes about Baseline targets as a proxy for your project's potential support profile.
  5. Once you've settled on a target, let us know the outcome. Post on LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky with the hashtag #WhatsMyBaseline and tell us what you chose.

We're curious not just about your final target number, but about how you got there. If you share, walk us through the reasoning—which support threshold you cared most about, how it lined up with the specific capabilities you wanted, and what your user base looks like. That insight helps us understand how Baseline performs in the real-world projects it was designed to serve.