Hello! I was looking at our browser support strategy page to figure out if we needed to support Firefox for Android (significant difference on its support of the datalist elements compared to desktop Firefox).
I could not see a hint about Firefox for Android anywhere on our browser support page.
Do you think that we should support the mobile versions of currently supported browsers (Firefox for Android, Chrome for Android, Safari on IoS)?
I’m +1 for not supporting them, it seems like a lot of work for a relatively limited user base.
Stats from the 9th of May 2023 used on CanIUse say that it’s 0.28% of users. For comparison, current users of IE11 is 0.37%. Moreover, hopefully each mobile version aims at having the same support as the ‘main’ version, so supporting the ‘main’ ones would be enough in the long term.
If we can agree that we don’t support mobile versions, I propose to add an entry to “Browsers that are not supported” on our browser support strategy page.
I’m -1 for this. We don’t list all the browsers that we do not support here, so I wouldn’t put emphasis on Firefox for android. We currently do not support officially any browser on mobile, which is a miss on our side and IMO we should improve this to support at least one (probably Chrome for Android as I expect it to be the most used). It would send the wrong message to start listing what we don’t support before improving what we support for me.
From what I saw, supporting a new browser is a lot of work, and having it be on a different OS makes it that much more difficult, especially for tests.
By “supporting” we mean:
issues created for these browsers in JIRA are not closed as won’t fix and we make a best effort to fix them
we include these browsers in our tests (be them automated or manual)
when we create new features or modify existing features we make a best effort to verify that they work on the supported list of browsers
I think the partial support would be a good solution: keeping the issues open on Jira and fixing them seems reasonable, however I hardly see who could have time to operate manual tests and extend the CI tests to include a mobile environment. Chrome for Android is very close to regular Chrome, so I think it makes sense to not ‘repeat’ all the tests. For the last point, I don’t think that’d be that much of a commitment, so we could probably include it in the partial support.
I think making things clearer is important, so we should add some info about this soon.
If we go with partial support, we’ll probably get a few more usability related reports.
Well the whole question about “support” is about what priority do we put for fixing those issues. Even if we don’t officially support a browser we could have the jira ticket and we could fix them.
So the risk with using your definition of partial support is that the tickets never got closed because it’s never a priority, and so in the end it’s not supported…
Even if the browsers are very closed, we don’t test with the mobile phone resolution and it impacts a lot the usability. And I’m not sure we have good automated test practice for it: i.e. if we have implemented our page objects with selenium so it checks property in the html without checking if those are actually visible in the UI with the actual resolution.
