Hi All, 

The portal team has had some discussions about what browsers we support on the wikipedia.org portal over the past week. Currently, our browser support is all over the map (in regards to IE anyway, almost literally any other browser release in the past 10 years works fine). 

- The typeahead suggestions work on IE6+ (but very slowly)

- The baseline event logging works on IE6+ 

- A/B test event logging works on IE8+ (requires localStorage)

- The JS language-picker works on IE9+ (requires CSS capabilities)

- The upcoming A/B test (localized top-links) work on IE8+ (hasn't been test on lower versions)

I think we should standardize on browser support. Currently our browser-usage from our dashboard shows  

IE7 at ~ 1%, 

IE8 at  ~1.5%

IE9 at ~ 1%

and IE6 isn't even on the map.

Mediawiki, and by extension wikipedia.org, has browser compatibility standards, published here: 

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility

I think since the wikipedia portal is a gateway to the rest of wikipedia, it makes sense to follow the same guidelines as the rest of wikipedia. This would mean dropping JS support for IE8 and lower. We would still provide 'basic' support to IE8 and below, meaning the non-js version of the portal would still work for these browsers. This change would slightly change our dashboard metrics, but it would certainly speed-up our development time, allowing us to do more with our limited resources. 

Any objections or concerns with this approach?

-Jan

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