[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Supported Browser Strategy

Hello, There are a lot of browsers out there and supporting them all in all versions is just too hard to be done in a quality manner with the number of committers we have. In addition we should try to explicitly list the level of support we have for each browser on xwiki.org so that users know what to expect, on a release by release basis. Thus I believe that we need a strategy and a general agreement about what browsers we want to support. I propose that by "supporting" we mean: - issues created for these browsers in jira are not closed as won't fix and we make a best effort to fix them - we include these browsers in our tests (be them automated or manual) - when we create new features or modify existing features we make a best effort to verify that they work on the supported list of browsers So here's a proposal: * Drop IE6 support - Dropping IE6 will provide a lot of benefits: 1) allow us to use newer technologies which are more useful, 2) remove lots of hacks we've accumulated over the years and 3) have more time to work on more relevant browser versions. A lot of products have now dropped support for IE6 and it's time we do it too. * Drop IE7 support - Currently, IE7's market share is similar to the one of IE6. They are both considered obsolete browsers for the same reasons as IE6 * Support IE8 - currently IE8 has the largest market share of all IEs and it is widely used in enterprise environments. * Support IE9 starting with 3.3 release - IE9 is slowly getting ground in front of IE8 * Support Mozilla Firefox 3.6 - even with the new release stragtegy of Mozilla, Firefox 3.6 still has aprox. 50% of all Mozilla browsers. This browser is still supported officially by Mozilla * Support Mozilla Firefox 4 and newer - The proposal is to support only the latest stable Firefox release since FF4+ have automatic upgrades. * Support Google Chrome 13 an newer - support the latest stable version of Chrome released as with FF4+ * Support Safari 5 in XWiki 3.3 and newer. * Don't officially support Opera - This means that we don't test against it all the time, we don't ensure that new feature work on it but if someone raises an issue in jira and it's easy to fix (or if someone provides a patch) then we fix it. * For all other non mentioned browsers - We don't officially support them (same strategy as for Opera above) I also propose that in the Release notes for each version of XWiki we mention the list of browsers we have tested against and that we "support". Best regards, Sorin B.