Browser Detection: Opera 12.14

[Tom Mettam]

Hello

Please consider removing the browser detection, and switch to using feature detection instead.

One reason why: Opera 12.14 actually supports CKEditor just fine, but only once the browser detection is removed.

[Anna Tomanek]

Hi Tom,

by default CKEditor is only enabled in the ​officially supported environments. You can, however, customize this behavior by allowing other browsers as described here: ​http://docs.ckeditor.com/#!/guide/dev_unsupported_environments

Do note, however, that this is an experimental feature i.e. you do it at your own risk. We cannot guarantee that CKEditor will work in these environments nor will be fix any bugs that you may encounter.

CKEditor releases are only tested in the browsers that are officially supported. In case of Opera, this is the latest stable release.

[Piotrek Koszuliński]

The reason why we use browser detection is that in 90% we do not detect features but bugs or other quirky behaviours. Writing checks for that is either impossible or would require many lines of code.

I haven't checked Opera 12.x recently, because it's a very old version, but I remember that as soon as we stopped testing it bugs appeared and by now I'm afraid that CKEditor would not work very well on Opera 12.x.

[Tom Mettam]

I understand, however I tried it using BrowserStack and everything appeared to work just fine (I modified the CKEditor source to permit it). The same is true for several other browser versions which are disabled in CKEditor.

[Anna Tomanek]

As written above, if you feel that you need and want to support additional environments, you have the instructions on how to achieve it readily available. However, from our point of view, we cannot keep on supporting (testing and fixing) older browser versions with minimal market share as it simply does not benefit the entire project and its audience, resource-wise.

We're happy that CKEditor works for you in your environment, but we would not fix it if it did not (and worked in a newer, officially supported version of the same browser).

[Tom Mettam]

I don't think anybody expects you to test and fix old browser versions.

However, I still feel that your method of excluding older browsers is flawed. It would be nice to at least have a list of these known "quirks".

[Piotrek Koszuliński]

Nothing stands against some contributor maintaining such lists and forked CKEditor version with enabled support for environments that we don't support, but which are okayish for certain purposes.