It would be useful to have immediate access to the release dates of browser versions in the Browser Compatibility chart.
The information could become visible when hovering over the actual version number, or concatenated to the preexisting tooltip when hovering over the browser icon.
Attached is an example:
Thanks, this idea came up before, and I think it would be worth adding such a tooltip!
Also, we’re almost unblocked to implement this, currently there is only one browser left that misses release data in our repository. Hoping to get to that PR soon.
I agree this would be really useful. I can’t help wondering if there’s a better way to show that information, but a tooltip is a good start.
Something we could eventually consider is some other time-based presentation for compatibility information, rather than our current tabular approach, although probably only as an optional view.
Looks like you can just modify this line to include hover text with the release data, though I think we’d need a new function to get the browser release info since getData() probably doesn’t work for the browser release info. We’d also need to pass either the release date into the getCellString() function or pass the browser name.
Here’s an example from Twitter of a future Firefox release number in BCD causing confusion: https://twitter.com/ivanhoe011/status/1054482939667451905
This suggestion might help alleviate this problem, assuming users know to mouse over the release number to look for this information. Discoverability might be an issue. User testing would be needed.
Would it make sense to have another color for cells in the compatibility tables for “Available in prerelease builds?” That might help with confusion like this…
Wow! As a dev I would be very surprised to find out that the pre-release version displays in the table. I think (and would expect) the table should be an at-a-glance summary of the current state.
More information (like pre-release versions) should be in the drop down.
Stephanie.
Our tables have always included prerelease builds. That said, I can see your point about it being potentially confusing, although this is the first time I’ve heard it brought up, literally, ever.
I’m not sure I like the idea of hiding that information down in the little “additional info” drop-down, though. Maybe if the feature is supported in a dev release (beta/nightly), we should draw the cell as if the item were not implemented but still list the version information?
(I love comments on the internet that start with “WTF”.)
Versions that are current for a given browsers change quite often (6 weeks for Firefox, similar for Chrome, but not in the same week). We haven’t yet reached frequent a re-rendering of compat tables that would allow us to be “current aligned” (a view that caniuse offers).
We’re doing a new round of user surveying and maybe that will help finding out if this is a problem for a lot of people or not.
Thanks.
I wonder if the reason it hasn’t come up is because of the number of devs who just don’t know that it’s not the current version.
That’s a really good point.
Or it’s because of the number of devs that know that it’s a pre‑release version and aren’t bothered by it.
