On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 05:19:51PM -0800, James Forrester wrote:
In WMF Engineering, we've been struggling with what we mean by 'supporting' browsers, and how we can match limited developer time to our natural desire to make everyone happy.
<snip> So, to turn this mass of text into an 'ask', I would love the thoughts of this list about this. Do you think this might work? Is "making sure all the different parts of MediaWiki keep working with <browser I love>" something you'd see yourself volunteering to do?
So, I think you're intermixing two different things: MediaWiki support and "WMF Engineering" or "cluster" browser support. They're not exactly the same thing.
For example, browsers make a huge difference in the SSL features they support. So, we currently don't do SNI, as it's unsupported on certain browser/platforms¹ (mainly: Windows XP and Android < 3). Other SSL features (e.g. RFC 5077) are in a similar state, and I guess we can think of other such features not exclusive to MediaWiki.
Should this policy be expanded to cover such cases too? I think so. We should definitely put more effort though and expand your use cases to ops use cases too.
Regards, Faidon
¹: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Browsers_with_support_fo...