Hi everyone,
At a recent community meeting, we talked about our browser support strategy for
Infusion. I offered to share our conversation here so that we can come to
consensus.
We talked a little about the identity of Infusion, which is both forward
looking and accommodating of many platforms and configurations. This requires a
true balancing act considering all our possible users, along with a
practicality regarding our limited resources. Since we build tools for other
people to use in their websites and applications, we must be conscious of their
users' requirements. We currently don't have an extensive list of people who
are using Infusion and in fact it may not be feasible to gather such a list.
We touched on several aspects of our current development process. This
included the cost of QA particularly when we modify the framework or upgrade
jQuery. It takes us about a week to complete a full QA cycle which ends up
being a significant deterrent to making framework changes and doing frequent
releases. We also talked about the amount of time we are spending on supporting
older browsers. We estimate that at least a month of development time during
1.4 was spent on making UIO work in IE6.
The final proposal we came to was two part:
1. We would stop trying to provide the same rich experience on all
browsers and platforms. Instead, we would move to a simpler, stripped down
experience on the older browsers. Practically speaking this will mean designing
and implementing a simpler version which would of course also need to be tested
during a QA cycle.
2. We would move to testing fewer combinations of browsers &
platforms. Likely we would test the latest Firefox, latest Chrome, latest
Safari, IE 8 and IE 9 on what ever OS the tester feels like testing. We would
address issues that crop up in other browser and platform combinations when
integrators or users find them. This strategy means that some amount of testing
burden would fall on integrators that require a browser that we don't QA.
Everyone, please comment on whether you'd support a move to this policy and
those that were at the meeting please correct any mistakes I've made or add
detail where it's needed.
Thanks,
Michelle
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