2008/11/25 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote: [snip]
Having accurate browser usage statistics would mean that we could precisely know what browser quirks should we support, in MediaWiki and Wikipedia's Javascript.
I expect the goal should be "Work reasonably well for 99.999(pick your length)% of users". While the average counts might be interesting (i.e. that firefox is closer to 30% than the often claimed penetration numbers for firefox) I don't know that precise numbers are actually very helpful for most compatibility purposes: I don't think we could ignore MSIE 5.x just because it is only 0.05% of requests from JS enabled browsers (which it is on enwp), or that we could do something different because MSIE 6.x is only 20.59% (likewise).
When doing a cost-benefit analysis you need to factor in the cost. Determining whether or not it is worth ignoring MSIE 5.x requires knowing both how many people use it and how difficult it would be to cater for them. You can't draw a conclusion from only half the story.