Hi all,
agreed Brooke and all.
There was one formulation in my starting email that should have phrased slightly differently for more clarity.
'Drop support' should have been 'drop dedicated support'. where users of Opera continue to be able to browse or edit the wikis in a basic manner. These changes, starting with the support matrix, just mean we're not actively testing against them anymore or, specifically for IE11, going a long way to ensure complete layout rendering equivalence with modern browsers. Again, in the case of Opera, Chromium versions will probably see exactly the same experience as before through active testing and bug fixing for supported versions of Chrome.
Per Timo's note about
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T342267 and in response to Sam's question, some data sets like those used by public analytics tools like
https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser are not believed to be completely accurate at this time. We used only Foundation internally accessible
https://superset.wikimedia.org/superset/explore/p/lj9Q8J5b67K/, which to our knowledge doesn't suffer from the same concerns about accuracy. This data suggests that over the past 12 months, usage across all Opera browsers combined comes to just over 0.1%, significantly less than even Edge Legacy. The updated matrix would reflect the reality that Opera is not actively tested against when developing new features.
Best,
Volker