It’s not that hard to find also Firefox bugs that only happen in one OS but not the others (in fact it’s easier thanks to bugzilla).

In the past, we have seen platform specific issues arise with both IE and Firefox. With IE this is generally in the area of activeX/directX controls. For Firefox the issues were generally rendering related.

As you mention, these browsers generally have the same bugs, but not always. This is the rationale for requiring testing on multiple platforms.

This assumption is worth challenging from time to time, and will be re-considered prior to the next quarterly update.

Indeed, USA should not be a global metric for Internet stats anymore. Sorry to say, but this country has stuck in legacy of Web 1.0 trash (just like South Korea with IE6, in linked example), and now its only slowing the global adoption of modern standards, browsers and practices.

on topic: Opera 10 is quite compliant browser, as are FF3.5+, Chrome 3+ or Safari 4+ . They have only a couple of minor inconsistencies between each other, which are not hard to track down and fix. And i hope IE9 will catch up with them, so all the major browsers will become interoperable ;)

I do use other browsers, Firefox, in particular, because of its range of extensions; sometimes Safari and Chrome, simply because their recent versions are so cool and beautiful. Of course I also use IE, because sometime you just have to, but it’s just not so fun.

I look forward to the day that you drop IE 6 support (and actually IE 7 as well, as it is also a mangy cur). Looking forward actually to IE 9 catching up in 2010 with where other browsers are in 2009!

I think it would be a mistake to drop Opera 10 – it is actually the main browser in some countries, particularly in Northern and Eastern Europe. Even taking Europe overall it still accounts for about 5-10% of all browsing, by most measures.

Drop IE 6 before Opera 10 from the A list. It is possible to provide progressive enhancement in a way that guarantees that IE 6 users have access without wasting resources giving them the full sunshine experience – that I think is fair. Running major lumps of javascript on IE 6 must be a nightmare anyway, as it is sooooo slow.

Anyway, that’s just my tuppenceworth. I have a feeling that you will end up supporting both Chrome and Opera. Chrome for the desktop, Opera for the SSD and for some European markets. (I know you don’t yet include SSD’s in your supported platforms, but you know you will have to, the market is going that way.)

Sorry for droning on so long ;-)

We have every expectation that FF 3.5 on 10.5 and 10.6 will perform similarly. By testing on the latest the OS version, we providing implicit coverage of the browser on other Mac OS X versions.

The idea here is to support all capable browsers by testing the right cross-section of capable browsers. A site that’s been tested against this A-Grade matrix is likely to do very well with the best X-Grade browsers, including FF 3.5.x on 10.5.

-Eric

We include all of our unit tests with each YUI release. Additionally we regression test all of the examples we have on the site against the A-grade matrix.

We are working on automating these, however keep in mind that while the YUI team is the owner and caretaker for this list, it is the baseline matrix for Yahoo! as a whole. As with other sites, depending on specific traffic, available QA resources, and other business concerns, various Y! properties may have more or less strict testing requirements. For example, even though its considered X-grade, we have been testing Chrome against most of our core components for the past couple of release cycles. Ditto for Opera 10 beta.

Unit tests are fairly easy to automate against a wide range of browsers, however deep functional testing against a site or “application” requires manual QA cycles, which need to be allocated as strategically as possible.

Seems to me that 10.5 isn’t going to drop of the radar just because of Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard is after all Intel-only, and as such I feel that there will be a lot of people running PPC Mac’s using Firefox 3.5 that simply can’t switch to 10.6.

Is there any data that decision is based on?