- Affected components: MediaWiki core, skins and extensions.
Motivation
This RFC is split out of T248061. On the mobile site, Android 2 is not supported any more and respectively not mentioned in mobile support section of Compatibility article.
- Improve the user experience by making pages load slightly faster and use less bandwidth, because we'd send less CSS code down the wire.
- Take away maintenance-burden of writing fallback CSS for newer CSS features not supported in Android 2. The effort spent here is a waste of our limited resources.
- Unlock use of newer CSS features that do not have a fallback and thus cannot be safely used today.
Features we would no longer consider optional or need fallbacks for:
- SVG background icons (no need to generate PNG fallbacks, and referring them, therefor reducing CSS size sent to all clients by a significant amount).
- position:fixed (caniuse, Wikimedia deployed)
Proposal
I'm proposing to remove Android 2.0+ (2.1-2.3) from “basic” support in the desktop compatibility matrix.
Statistics
Android 2 doesn't play a role in desktop at all, and has not been visible in our analytics.wikimedia.org for a while (it's under the 0.1% cut off as of October 2019).
Wikimedia sites currently receive about 36 million requests from Android 2 devices per month. About 60% of these are visits to the www.wikipedia.org portal, and the rest about evenly between the mobile and desktop domains.
For the desktop domains and Wikipedia portal, the traffic is mainly from USA, Canada, Brazil, Ireland and France. Our mobile site has officially already dropped basic support ("Grade C") for Android 2. Details at T249788#6060612.