We've had this conversation several times in the last few years and I think I've finally figured out why it has always felt subtly wrong.
Our share of users on older platforms is disproportionally high compared to the market in general because of our decline in market share. People who don't want to upgrade their OS generally don't want to "upgrade" their browser to the shiny new "chrome" thing the kids are talking about either. It is a symptom of a larger problem and it seems like we are continually hiding from that problem instead of tackling it head-on. We should be aggressively cutting support for niche markets and spending that effort to increase our market share where it counts: where it's growing rather than rapidly shrinking. Telling 1.2% of our (admittedly small) market share to, effectively, GTFO, is pretty scary; however, I think the alternative is to simply fail as a project as we chase our users-by-default into more and more niche markets. If we can't use our resources to re-capture 1.2% of the market among people who have modern computers and no obligation to love us, then maybe we've already failed. We need to drop support for OSX 10.8 and Windows Vista yesterday, not next year. We need to cut our losses and ship E10S while we're still relevant. We need to be the browser that works best on Android and Windows 10, not the browser that happens to already be installed. My 2 cents, :terrence On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 9:20 AM, Benjamin Smedberg <benja...@smedbergs.us> wrote: > > > On 3/10/2016 5:25 PM, Mike Hommey wrote: > >> >> It's unfair to mention those populations by percentage of the global >> Firefox population. >> > > Why do you think this is unfair? This is about making the best use of our > limited engineering/testing/QA resources, and so what really matters is the > total impact, not just the impact relative to the mac population. > > Dolske answered with more details about the numbers. > > On 3/10/2016 6:38 PM, Nils Ohlmeier wrote: > >> Excuse my ignorance, but what means “deprecate support” exactly? >> >> I’m only asking because of the opposing reply’s so far. I’m assuming it >> means we stop testing and building/releasing for these. Would it be a >> possible alternative to turn of the tests, but continue to build and >> release unsupported builds? >> > We intend to do the following things: > > * add version checking to the builds so that they refuse to run on these > versions of MacOS > * stop doing any software testing on these versions of MacOS > * stop automated testing on Mac 10.6 > > As soon as we stop testing, we are going to break things. We shouldn't be > willing to call things "Firefox" that we aren't proud of, which includes > real testing. > > > > On 3/10/2016 6:49 PM, Kyle Huey wrote: > >> >> Why can't we just not ship e10s to these users? We have a number of other >> populations we're not shipping to, at least for now. >> > > We did explicitly consider this option and ultimately rejected it. It > would potentially buy us at least one more ESR cycle until next January. > After that point we want e10s to be the only configuration. It comes at the > cost of ignoring known issues already as well as a nontrivial amount of > testing. Ultimately we don't believe this is the right tradeoff. It also > prevents us making progress on other areas such non-universal builds. > > --BDS > > > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
