Thursday, May 23, 2013

Re: Exception reporting is broken in GWT: would you support a kickstarter project to fix it?

I agree on do not remove IE7 and IE8. A lot of user still using them.


2013/5/23 Alex Epshteyn <alexander.epshteyn@gmail.com>
Hi Thomas,

Thanks for chiming in and providing the extra info.  Good to know.

I'd like to ask, however, the reasons for planning to remove support for IE6/7/8?  Why would we do that?  It's already there and doesn't require too much maintenance.

As of today, nearly 8% of my site's visitors are on IE8 and close to 1% are still on IE7.  These are pretty big numbers for a high traffic website, and would translate into lost revenue if the browsers weren't supported.  I can't imagine Google pulling support for a browser with that kind of usage for one of its products. .  Here's the full data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvMlWdpkpAA6dGdpa3lsZTVQWl9qcFJrWmZCZ0ZZb0E#gid=0

Also, as you guys can see from the data, stack emulation is still required for 54% of my site's traffic.

While I'd like to see users upgrading to the latest browsers as much as any developer, let's be realistic: WinXP is not going away any time soon (Microsoft dropping support for it isn't going to make people like my dad go out and buy a new computer).  Google Analytics is shows that 80% of my users are on Windows and 21% of those are still on Windows XP: that is a very big number!



On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 5:13 AM, Thomas Broyer <t.broyer@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 11:53:47 PM UTC+2, Alex Epshteyn wrote:
Thanks for your comment.  Let me respond to your points:

1) I've seen this point discussed before, and the standard counter-argument is that the spirit of OSS is free as in "freedom," not "beer."  Lots of developers get paid to work on OSS projects.

2) This is actually one of the reasons I'm thinking about raising funds.  I am already on the verge of using my patch inside my own GWT-based app, but if I get some funding I'd be able to justify taking the extra time to make sure the patch will pass the review process.

+1 to those 2 points.
 
3) I must point out that your third argument is not in the spirit of GWT, which aims to support as many browsers as possible.

That's not entirely true. GWT only ever supported the 4 major browser engines: Trident (IE), WebKit (SquirrelFish / V8; aka Safari / Chromium), Gecko (Firefox) and Presto (Opera).

Jens is right: we'll soon remove support for IE6 and 7, and then for IE8 (not long after MS drops support for WinXP).
GWT never really "supported" Opera, and the level of support was only against the latest version. Now that Opera is moving from Presto to Chromium, that means one less platform to support in the very near future (by the next GWT release, but we'll probably keep the "opera" permutation along for one more release).

As of today, you will not get good stack traces with GWT on any modern browser, including WebKit.  By "relevant information", I assume you mean sourcemaps support.  Well, Chrome is the only browser that currently supports sourcemaps but GWT's existing support for generating stack traces with that information is very buggy, and this is one of the things I'm working on improving.  I'm also not optimistic that sourcemaps will achieve universal support any time soon, if ever.

Chromium has it for a while (hence Chrome –all platforms–, Opera for Android –though what matters is the remote debugger, not the browser– and Opera.next), and Firefox is starting to roll it out [1,2] in 23 (currently Aurora channel) and I'm told the next Safari should have it too [3].
Will IE ever have it? I believe so, particularly now that MS is pushing languages that compile to JS (TypeScript, which can generate sourcemaps). Obviously that would only be available in IE11 (or later), but it seems like it would be possible to have support in your IDE with the help of an IE plugin [4] for IE8/9/10 (would it work in Windows 8 though?)

That said, source maps support in the browser is related to, but different from stack trace resymbolization.

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