On 20 November 2012 20:00, Faidon Liambotis <faidon(a)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 statsĀ¹. 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(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester