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)