Whether it be a targeted list of browsers, a list of browsers we explicitly ignore, or something else entirely, anything that helps us balance engineering resources is a good thing.
In 2010 I suggested a rule, which became somewhat of a policy, that WMF won't spend time/money supporting browsers that have 0.1% market share or less based on our own stats[1] for reading and editing Wikitext source code in a textarea. Other kinds of features, such as extra editing features or, in the case of my current project, using the VisualEditor can have higher thresholds, and these thresholds will be set based on whatever the team sees as a balance between supporting as many users as possible and making enough progress to get things out the door at a reasonable pace.
The most important distinction here is that there are different levels of support based on the feature being considered. This is known as progressive enhancement, it's a very common technique, and we use it all the time with success. Currently we depend on our jquery.client module to black-list certain browsers with known compatibility issues. This allows new browsers, or ones we haven't tested with yet, to not be shut out just because we didn't explicitly give them the OK. I believe that this is an effective way to be friendly to the future, while also resolving known compatibility problems.
Bottom line:
1. Doing whatever it takes to make all features work in all browsers means spending 90% of our money on 10% of our users. - Spending 90% of our money on 10% of our users is a waste of donated money. - Wasting donated money is unethical. - Even if it were 80% of our money for 20% of our users, it's still out of balance. 2. Only spending money on engineering projects that will easily work for 100% of our users will severely limit what we can do. - Severe limitations on what we can do will make our user experience inferior to the rest of the web. - An inferior user experience will reduce the number of users we have. - Even if this only costs us 10% of our users, we've just lost the same number of people, but now our software sucks. 3. Balancing compatibility with better features will result in a better user experience. - A better user experience will increase the number of users we have. - This can easily offset the users we lost because they are still using IE 5.5 on Windows 2000.
- Trevor
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm
On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 12:19 PM, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On 11/21/2012 11:33 AM, Steven Walling wrote:
I was going to go on a long rant here in response to your assertion that
we
shouldn't have a flashy interface, but I'll spare everyone and just say that I strongly disagree.
I am not opposed to having a flashy interface at all and did not assert anything like that.
However, having flashy interfaces does not automatically mean that the user experience for users with older soft / hardware has to be bad. In many cases, it is actually pretty easy from a technical perspective to provide a reasonable experience for older browsers while still having flashy things where supported.
I fear that a binary browser policy would discourage people from keeping this in mind, and think that we can do better than that.
-- Gabriel Wicke Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Foundation
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