Just a quick note: Android 2.3 and Windows Phone 7.5 (IE 9) devices have no software upgrade path; we can only wait for them to fall out of the market as devices get replaced. [Well technically Android 2.3 users could run Firefox, but getting people to switch browsers on mobile is hard!]

Windows Phone 8 (IE 10) devices should be all upgradable to Windows Phone 8.1 (IE 11) sometime in the next few months, so IE 10 shouldn't linger as long as 9 has... hopefully.


I'm also a little worried to see old versions of Chrome in there; does this mean there's a lot of people who aren't turning on updates on their phone and are using an old version that shipped with the phone? Or is there something else holding back updates on some devices? With Chrome and Firefox on fast release cycles, it can be a pain to support old bugs...

-- brion



On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 4:31 PM, Juliusz Gonera <jgonera@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Since our support table for browsers [1] is wildly out of date, we should come up with something better. Oliver generated some statistics for us from the last 30 days from logs for text/html requests (see attachment).

I think we could divide browsers into Grade A and Grade B categories, similarly to desktop. Grade A would be full support, Grade B would be basic support for reading (non-JS version). Two additional suggestions:

* Don't care about anything below < 0.1%
* Drop support for JS for any problematic browser with < 0.5% (mark them as Grade B)

I think coming up with a generic metric like "support last N versions of X and last M versions of Y" for all browsers would be hard because the browser landscape changes pretty fast. I'd rather reevaluate our support table every few months. For now, I propose the following:

Grade A:
* Mobile Safari 5-7 (that includes Chrome for iOS since it uses Safari's engine)
* Android Browser 2.3+ (drop 2.3 to grade B as soon as it's < 0.5%)
* Chrome for Android 18+
* Firefox for Android, latest version (since it's not very popular, but still a good browser)
* IE Mobile 9+ (drop 9 to grade B as soon as it's < 0.5%)
* Blackberry Webkit 7+

Grade B:
* lower versions of browsers in Grade A
* Opera Mini 4+
* NetFront 3+
* Ovi Browser 2+
* Nokia Browser 7+

When it comes to Grade B browsers, I don't think we should test on them very regularly, but accept bugs that come from their users.

Comments?

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Browser_support#Mobile_browsers

--
Juliusz

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