GOn Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 09:17:24AM -0800, James Forrester wrote:
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.
Doh, my bad.
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.
Well, I think with this exception you're trying to adjust the "latest browser" rule to cover special cases, instead of acknowledging these special cases for what they are.
e.g. if IE 11 comes out in 6 months while IE 8/Windows XP remains prevalent, are we going to adjust the rule to say "three immediately-previous versions"? What if Microsoft suddenly decides to use the Chrome/Firefox versioning scheme?
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 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.
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? ;-)
Well, it completely makes sense to me to have a supported browsers policy, if that's what you're asking. On the other hand, I'm no MediaWiki or web developer, so my view should be considered as such :)
Regards, Faidon