On 21 November 2012 11:54, Faidon Liambotis faidon@wikimedia.org wrote:
The real reason is that you want Windows XP support, so you might just as well put that in the rules, instead of extrapolating from the browser's platform support. Also, do note another thing from the other sub-thread: SNI works on IE 8 on Vista or later, but not on IE 8 on Windows XP, so the browser version rule won't work well in this case.
I know; forgive my terseness.
It's a defendable line to say "if you want to keep using Windows XP, you can't use IE to do more than basic use (e.g., HTTPS will not work); if you want more, use a different browser or different OS". I don't think it's appropriate now if it's 10% of all users, but in a year? Maybe. But this isn't my call to make alone, and is more appropriate for Platform and Ops. :-)
I think there is a more general flaw here, as also evident with the Android exception. The problem is that you just can't drop support for browsers that have a large market share, no matter when they were released. I think that market share needs to be factored in in the policy, or else we'll end up adding exceptions to the rules every time our policy dictates that we're going to drop support for an older but popular platform.
The "policy" is to have a list of browsers that we target. If we decide the list is longer than I originally proposed, that's fine. The idea is to have an agreed point where we say "sorry, but we can't justify spending donor funds on fixing the problems with your browser", instead of the current problem of trying to make do with ad-hoc decisions.
J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester