On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 4:28 PM, Terrence Cole <tc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> 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. > I don't think it's quite that simple. I agree that it's important to recognize that users on older OSes have lower long-term value to us, because we'll _eventually_ need to stop supporting them, and there's no guarantee they'll reinstall Firefox if they move to a new machine. However, they _do_ have short-term value, in that their continued use of Firefox makes the Web better for every other Firefox user. The number of f***s web developers give about the experience of Firefox users is directly proportional to the number of Firefox users visiting their sites. The lower that number goes, the bigger our disadvantage, and the more engineering heroics we'll need to do to compensate. By the time Opera/Presto went under, rumor has it that almost all of their resources were going to web-compat. Its a regressive game that favors monopolists, but there you go. Ditching 1.2% of our users makes it materially more difficult to attract new ones. So we should only do it if the benefits really outweigh the costs. I'm happy to be more aggressive about ignoring 10.6-only regressions, reducing testing, etc. If it keeps the costs manageable, I think it's preferable to ship a possibly-sub-par experience to 10.6 users than to jettison them entirely. bholley > 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 > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
