On 18/01/12 14:44, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
I'm curious what the current demographic/usage cases for text browsers are. I'm not asking this to undercut the argument, but as a developer hoping to improve the Wikipedia experience for as many users as possible. It's my understanding that blind users no longer use text browsers, but instead use screen readers with regular browsers (based on my one conversation with a blind Wikimedian). Who are the people using text browsers and why? What is the current text browsing experience like on Wikipedia? Do we serve the mobile version to text browsers or the regular version of the site? Is Lynx still the most popular text browser?
Sorry for my ignorance on this subject.
Most of our bug reports about text browser support come from Jidanni, who has his own special reasons for using a text browser, as you can see in his reply.
We have had a few other people complain about text browser issues over the years. One such user told me that s/he used a text browser via SSH to a personal server, as a workaround for corporate network access policies denying access to the outside web.
Probably these two users are roughly representative of text browser users in general:
* A group who use a text browser as a strange personal choice * A group who use a text browser out of temporary technical necessity (ancient/broken hardware, restricted network access, etc.)
Certainly such users are extremely rare, neither w3m nor Lynx appear on the long list of User-Agent headers at
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm
So it follows that they make up less than 0.02% of requests.
-- Tim Starling