On 21/11/12 18:33, James Forrester wrote:
On 20 November 2012 23:54, Martijn Hoekstra wrote:
I think a best of both worlds would be preferable. I haven't seen the stats, but I'd assume market share of IE 10 will be quite low. Still it would be silly to not strive to support it.
Well, until this month IE 10 wasn't released (just a developer version; I wasn't counting these). Thus the "current and immediately-previous versions" for IE would have been 9 and 8. Supporting browsers before they're released is a nice-to-have and, as you say, sensible to get ahead of the work, but it's not as crucial as fixing "live" versions for millions of people.
Funnily, Firefox 17 was released yesterday. So the latest Firefox is in fact not shown in [[VisualEditor/2012-13_Q2_forward-look]] and I doubt anyone on this thread had it installed when it started.
Which serves as a counterexample for the Brion statement of "nobody should be running Chrome 22". Which was released two months ago.
I think that in addition to the some rule for the rapid release versions, like "plus all its versions released in the last year" would be needed.
Does it seem too much? Well, a year ago we were at Firefox 9. But Firefox 10 is itself an Extended Support Release. Does this mean much more work? It depends. For common browsers, we could develop for the "new" and "old" versions. If it works for both, it is likely to work in all the releases inbetween, too. If the feature only works for some version (eg. suppose ContentEditable had been added on FF 12 [if was in fact FF 3]), it could be documented, and the feature supported just from that one onwards.
We must support old browsers, to the point where a browser designed in the HTML4 days should provide an _acceptable_ experience. Yes, you wouldn't have fancy HTML5 video or . But that shouldn't mean that you couldn't rollback a certain vandalism with malformed wiktext because it completely broke your editor.
We should have such a great-vision goal in mind. Then for «hard» features such as Visual Editor, we may need to be satisfied with much less, of course.
The bad thing I see with saying "volunteers can add VE support for $SMALLBROWSER if they wish" is that only a few will be able to understand the code, much less to fix it.