Talk:VisualEditor/2012-13 Q2 forward-look

Browser support

To determine if you are going to support a specific browser, why don't you create a weighted percentage. So start with all browsers that make up >1% of all hits to the site. Then subtract say 1% for every browser bug that has to be worked around in code (raising maintenance costs) and 5% for every bug that can't be worked around (meaning some specific functionality of the wiki is broken in that browser). You could reference the bug numbers in the matrix so it would be completely obvious how you came to a specific conclusion.

On a different topic, how can you not support IE8 when that's 8% of your hits? That's an enormous number of users. --Cneubauer (talk) 13:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

To answer your second point first: because, by your suggested metric, IE8 would be negative several hundred per cent.

This would be an intriguing piece of work. But we don't have people lying around able to take on such a mammoth task. Also, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "bug numbers" - most browsers don't have a public bug repository, and the ones that do rarely are the ones we have problems with. :-) Are you suggesting (for example) that MediaWiki should track thousands of upstream bugs like "IE (10 and below) deviate from HTML specification by ignoring 'contenteditable: false;', or similar?" Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Supported Browsers

I understand that supporting every browser isn't easy and I think the old 0.1% rule (or even the 1% rule) was a good choice. But at the moment you only reach 61,89% of the users. So nearly 40% won't be able to use the visual editor - 180 million people.
I have a little problem with the table: Where is Opera Mobile? It's the third most used mobile browser (19%), but you only count Opera Mini as mobile browser. Is Opera Mobile integrated in the desktop column?
Supporting a wide range of browsers is not only about their market share - it's about a free choice. So maybe don't put much man power in an old Chrome version - users can update to the newest version. But there are users who would have to change their browser - so I hope you will support IE 8 and especially Opera. --APPER (talk) 19:48, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I would love to support more browsers, but it comes down to resources - to get just IE8 to work, we would probably have to re-write the entire display codebase to use in parallel because it fails so badly to follow the standards and the ways that other browsers work. In cash terms, we're probably talking about several hundred thousand US Dollars over the term of the project. I don't think that that is a justifiable expenditure of donors' funds. Similarly, supporting Opera looks to be hugely difficult for a number of reasons (mostly related to its JavaScript support). The VisualEditor is far from done, and likely won't be widely rolled out until well into next year. When we have completed most of it, then is a reasonable time to devote significant efforts to more marginal browsers. Also, note that by that time, the use of older versions of browsers will likely have changed significantly, so making judgements now is premature. I'm not against "free choice" in browser usage, but someone has to pay for that choice, and I'm not sure it should be our donors.

To answer your question about Opera Mobile, from our numbers no use of Opera Mobile is > 0.1% (the highest is Opera 12.00 Mobi on 0.06%), so its numbers will be merged into the overall Opera numbers (the 1.48%).

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 23 November 2012 (UTC)