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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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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