On 21 November 2012 11:54, Faidon Liambotis <faidon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
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 know; forgive my terseness.
It's a defendable line to say "if you want to keep using Windows XP,
you can't use IE to do more than basic use (e.g., HTTPS will not
work); if you want more, use a different browser or different OS". I
don't think it's appropriate now if it's 10% of all users, but in a
year? Maybe. But this isn't my call to make alone, and is more
appropriate for Platform and Ops. :-)
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.
The "policy" is to have a list of browsers that we target. If we
decide the list is longer than I originally proposed, that's fine. The
idea is to have an agreed point where we say "sorry, but we can't
justify spending donor funds on fixing the problems with your
browser", instead of the current problem of trying to make do with
ad-hoc decisions.
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester