On 21 November 2012 07:41, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
What types of problems are giving you a hard time keeping the support? Newest versions of browsers can be as painful to support as legacy ones, but the types of problems are probably very different.
Are we talking about bugs in the browsers? Sui generis interpretations of HTML/CSS/JS specs? Performance problems? Limitations in the devices using those browsers? Use of browser X specific features / workarounds in our software?
All of these, but especially the "Specification? What specification? We do things differently here!" problem.
Or is it simply a matter of us being unable to test through >15 browsers and therefore trying to find criteria to limit the number to a more feasible <10?
No; testing infrastructure is something we need to do however many browsers we're supporting (and is trivial compared to the work in supporting the CSS issues of IE7, for example).
Someting to take into account is that developer teams of browsers not in Wikimedia's "Tier 1" might be interested in driving the tests themselves, as part of their productization work. Think of Opera, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Series 40... Wikipedia is a top global site and probably they are already testing their latest version against it.
We could guide them better on what to test and how to find / file / comment on bugs and contribute patches. Having a regular contact in each of those teams would be really useful.
Would this be helpful, and fitting in your browser support plans?
Yes, definitely; if someone from Opera wanted to put in the work to make Opera and MediaWiki compatible, and that that would make more sense as patches for MW rather than for Opera, of course we'd love to see that. This is what I meant by "[i]f a volunteer is willing to work like hell to make, say, the VisualEditor work in Opera we would try to support them by reviewing/accepting patches".
Having better (any?) relationships with the browser manufacturers would be excellent, of course.
J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester