On Tue, 2012-12-18 at 16:03 +0000, Gervase Markham wrote: > Hi everyone, > > After taking all input into account, I have decided that we should drop > the "Tablet" token from Fennec's UA on tablets. This is what Android > browser and Chrome do, and corresponds to option D) of my original > options. So for non-"Mobile" devices, it would be: > > Mozilla/5.0 (Android; rv:12.0) Gecko/12.0 Firefox/12.0 > > We should be aware that we _may_ in the future need to add "Touch" on > Windows 8 Metro only, if developers start detecting it in large numbers > and consequently sites start breaking. We should write up on MDN and > publicise a document of best practices in detecting and using touch > events cross-browser, to try and make that less likely. > > It's relevant to note that, according to recent ADI data, Tablet users > make up about 25% of Fennec installs, for a total of about 388,000 ADIs, > so perhaps a million users. (Thanks to Anurag Phadke on the Metrics team > for getting the data for me here.) > > To elaborate on some points people may ask about: > > - We would therefore use "Mobile" on devices where we thought a mobile > experience should be the default, and the desktop UA where we think a > desktop experience should be the default. At the moment, opinion seems > to be that phones are "Mobile" and tablets from 7" up are not, but we > have the flexibility to change that view later.
How? By switch more devices to the "Mobile" variant? > - Given the short time this token has been in use, and the small number > of Tablet Fennec users (relative to e.g. desktop), we don't expect > significant compatibility problems. The speed we deploy this change is a > trade-off between "minimising the number of browsers with the old UA" > and "making sure we can detect any compatibility problems". So therefore > the exact timing and train schedule of deployment of the change would be > a matter for the release-drivers. > - For the above reasons (short time, relatively small number of users), > I am not too concerned that large numbers of web developers are going to > have been detecting our "Tablet" string, or that this will lead to > frustration at our "ever-changing" UA. If I understand what you are proposing I think its reasonable given we are switching to the "desktop" UA. But I come from the camp that UA changes should be for a deeply clear benefit, simply "it won't harm much" is not an argument for change in a property where changing it *never* again is the ideal. Thanks, -JP _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
