On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Bobby Holley <bobbyhol...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 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. > Though actually, I think the reality is worse than that, because the curve is probably non-linear. There's probably some relatively-discrete point (which we can't easily predict) at which declaring Firefox an "unsupported browser" becomes a sensible business decision for large, enterprise-y sites that operate that way. We should try very hard to stay above that threshold. I don't know how much closer to it this proposal will bring us, but it's definitely more than 1.2%. > 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
