On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think we could ignore MSIE 5.x just because it is only 0.05% of requests from JS enabled browsers (which it is on enwp), or that we could do something different because MSIE 6.x is only 20.59% (likewise).
We already do. For instance, I deliberately ignored IE6 when adding support for filetype-based icons for external links. I used [href$=.pdf] and so on despite the fact that I knew IE6 didn't support that, and declined a request to add in JavaScript-based fallback for IE6. In this case, the fallback was graceful, with just the regular external link icon showing up instead of the special one, so I didn't view support for IE6 as worth it.
That kind of determination can be made much more sensibly if we know browser usage figures. (Although in this particular case, I'm fairly sure IE6 was something like 50% at the time -- I didn't care because it was a trivial issue and IE6 was obsolescent.)
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Some people have talked about cutting the UA to some abstraction level but IMHO it's better to aggregate the whole header and group by browser.
So you could get something like this:
*Mozilla Firefox 2% **Mozilla Firefox 3 **Mozilla Firefox 2 **Mozilla Firefox 1 and older
*Internet Explorer 5% **Internet Explorer 8 (beta) - 0.5% **Internet Explorer 7 - 2% **Internet Explorer 6 - 2% **Internet Explorer 5 and older - 0.5% ***Mozilla/4.0 Windows 95 IE4.0 broken 0.0001%
....
A breakdown at the granularity of browser version/OS version should also be available. So we should be able to tell the percentage of IE6 SP1 on Windows XP, for instance, at least. (The service pack number can be significant for IE: IE bugs are sometimes fixed in service packs.)