Last modified: 2013-06-19 16:23:01 UTC

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Bug 49802 - VisualEditor: IE8 support
VisualEditor: IE8 support
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: VisualEditor
Classification: Unclassified
General (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Unprioritized enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: James Forrester
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2013-06-19 09:20 UTC by Oliver Keyes
Modified: 2013-06-19 16:23 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Oliver Keyes 2013-06-19 09:20:41 UTC
Tracking bug; the VisualEditor doesn't seem to work in IE8 (this may be a feature as well as a bug). I'm going to recommend that people upgrade, and mark this as an enhancement, but: it would be nice to have an official statement on if this is coming, if so, when, if not, why, etc.
Comment 1 Brion Vibber 2013-06-19 14:00:57 UTC
Kill it with fire!
Comment 2 Oliver Keyes 2013-06-19 14:02:11 UTC
That's an en_INTERNET idiom. Do you want me to sic the internationalisation team on you? Cuz I will.
Comment 3 James Forrester 2013-06-19 15:39:11 UTC
This is a WONTFIX; Internet Explorer in general doesn't support many of the key technologies that VisualEditor relies upon, and this becomes more acute the further back from IE10 you get.

Supporting "just" IE9 and IE10 has been approximately 90% of our browser-specific workload; for IE8 support, we would need to write an entirely parallel implementation of VisualEditor just for that (and even then, most things wouldn't work).

We cannot justify spending a very significant amount of donors' funds on IE8, which is (as of May) less than 5% of all our readers, and likely even less than that for editors. See [[mw:VisualEditor/Target browser matrix]] (which needs to be updated) for detail about which browsers we actively support.
Comment 4 Oliver Keyes 2013-06-19 16:05:06 UTC
Makes a lot of sense. Any specific technologies that are problematic? Just so I can avoid coming off as "we're not doing it, it's hard".
Comment 5 James Forrester 2013-06-19 16:20:53 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> Makes a lot of sense. Any specific technologies that are problematic? Just
> so I can avoid coming off as "we're not doing it, it's hard".

Primary technologies:
* HTML 5, most notably with ContentEditable (IE8 has basic support; IE in general has major issues with elements that aren't editable inside ones that are - e.g. templates inside pages - though we've found a way to hack around it in IE9&10 for now)
* Javascript (ECMAScript) 5 (not all of it, which is good as IE9 doesn't do that either, but more than IE8 supports)
* Selection interaction (IE's support is... Quixotic, to be polite)
* Key detection/over-riding (same as for selection)
Comment 6 Oliver Keyes 2013-06-19 16:23:01 UTC
Great! Thanks.

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