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
>> >
>> >
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>> >
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>
>
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