On 18/01/12 14:44, Ryan Kaldari wrote: > I'm curious what the current demographic/usage cases for text browsers > are. I'm not asking this to undercut the argument, but as a developer > hoping to improve the Wikipedia experience for as many users as > possible. It's my understanding that blind users no longer use text > browsers, but instead use screen readers with regular browsers (based > on my one conversation with a blind Wikimedian). Who are the people > using text browsers and why? What is the current text browsing > experience like on Wikipedia? Do we serve the mobile version to text > browsers or the regular version of the site? Is Lynx still the most > popular text browser? > > Sorry for my ignorance on this subject.
Most of our bug reports about text browser support come from Jidanni, who has his own special reasons for using a text browser, as you can see in his reply. We have had a few other people complain about text browser issues over the years. One such user told me that s/he used a text browser via SSH to a personal server, as a workaround for corporate network access policies denying access to the outside web. Probably these two users are roughly representative of text browser users in general: * A group who use a text browser as a strange personal choice * A group who use a text browser out of temporary technical necessity (ancient/broken hardware, restricted network access, etc.) Certainly such users are extremely rare, neither w3m nor Lynx appear on the long list of User-Agent headers at http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm So it follows that they make up less than 0.02% of requests. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
