On 20 November 2012 20:00, Faidon Liambotis faidon@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 05:46:22PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
"Current and immediately-previous" releases are also really hard to match up between projects on fast release cycles (like Chrome and Firefox which are pushing out new "major versions" every couple months) and those where "major versions" only change a few times per decade, like IE.
Supporting Chrome 22 (23 - 1) and supporting IE 9 (10 - 1) are totally different animals with different usage profiles. Really nobody should be running Chrome 22 -- it probably means your computer's broken and not installing updates -- but IE 9's all over the place -- as is 8.
Agreed. IE 9 is only supported from Vista onwards and Windows XP is 21.29% of our user base according to the latest stats¹. I'm not sure it's realistic to say that 20% of our user base may just "happen to work" by luck.
Those numbers are people using Windows XP, not people using Windows XP with IE. I believe the numbers for (XP && IE) are going to be substantially lower - probably half - but still far to high to discount. However, you are right that Windows XP is likely to become the next barrier to proper Web development after IE6, and perhaps we should instead make an exception for IE compared to the other big four browsers and suggest supporting current, and two immediately-previous versions.
Given that I suggested "I'd be happy to talk through the individual browser-level decisions but it might be easier to agree that we want to focus browser support before we decide the exact focus of this." I'm assuming this means you're happy with the overall policy and we're just bike-shedding over which versions of which browsers? ;-)
J. -- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester