Consider dropping browser version strings from the site

[mgol]

An issue created as a spin-off from https://github.com/WordPress/browsehappy/issues/24#issuecomment-172989859, by advice from @coffee2code:

BrowseHappy seems to be aimed mostly at regular users; I wonder if browser versions for rapid release browsers should be included at all. Once a browser goes into such a schema, its versions stop getting advertised and start getting treated as an internal technical detail meant mostly to developers & technically aware people.

Mozilla stopped advertising the Firefox version some time after switching to the rolling release schema (it's not mentioned anywhere at https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/), Opera did it as well once it joined the Chromium cycle; Chrome has always hidden its version, Edge does so as well (IE, which had a slower cycle, did show its version string to users, urging them to try version 8, 9, 10, in the end 11).

Most people won't even know when to find the version string for non-IE browsers.

[mgol]

@coffee2code Replying to https://github.com/WordPress/browsehappy/issues/24#issuecomment-173009018

All browsers will report their version number within the browser somewhere (even if not someplace obvious to most users) and thus is technically checkable by them. The EdgeHTML is AFAIK not currently checkable (a user would have to determine their Edge version then cross-reference a resource that shows what EdgeHTML was part of it, or they would have to find a UA parsing site, or something else just as convoluted).

It's the opposite: they're displayed in the same place. For example this is what you see in latest stable Edge, in the Settings sidebar:

AFAIK this is the only place where you can see the Edge app version (i.e. 25).

They didn't display the EdgeHTML version (back then 12) when the app shell had version 20, though, that's probably what you remember. :)

[coredumperror]

Seconded!

[coffee2code]

@mgol Ah, so they've updated it! I don't use Windows so I couldn't verify the current state of whether the EdgeHTML version is reported to the user yet or not. However, my paragraph that followed in the comment you quoted addresses my thoughts on if it is:

Via the Microsoft post I referenced upthread, they do intend to eventually report the EdgeHTML version number (if they haven't already). Even then, if we reported the EdgeHTML version number instead [without making a bunch of special exceptions in the code and the design], it wouldn't be obvious to a user that that version pertains to EdgeHTML (which, by the way, they probably won't know what the heck that is) and not the Edge version.

But that's neither here nor there. This issue is whether the version numbers should even be displayed on the site any longer and for that the case you made is sound. I agree, browser version numbers have been de-emphasized now more than ever, even by the browsers themselves. It's no longer a meaningful piece of data, especially for users.

+1

[le717]

I timing of this discussion is amazingly coincidental for me. I was thinking about this exact topic the other night and am writing a blog post on it and I found some useful bits of info for my post brought up here.

I'm for dropping the version numbers- except for IE. While upgrading to IE is not actually much of an upgrade, IE 11 is better than 9 by a long shot. Further, Microsoft is actively pushing specifically IE 11 or Edge in an attempt to get users off the now unsupported IE 8-10. In IE's case, not reporting the version might garner a response of "it says I am already using Internet Explorer, so I do not need to update." For the people I've provided IT support for, many of them knew how to check the IE version, so it may be beneficial to keep the 11 for IE. Developers may argue the same for Safari (since there are particular versions that are so buggy even jQuery stays away from them) but Safari has already been mentioned here.

The problem then is how only browser shows the version and none of the others, making it looks different and possibly out-of-place.

Just for reference, Google's What Browser? site does not list the version for any browser, including IE, so there is some form of precedence on this whole issue.