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Comment by apocalyptic0n3 | Hacker News Reader

I actually dislike the change to the Compatibility Chart. The checkmark serves the same purpose as green vs red boxes did (and is frankly less readable at a glance, not more) and being able to quickly see relative times features were added at a glance made it easy to evaluate whether to use a feature or not. Guess I'll have to revert to using Can I Use? for this again. I had mostly replaced that with MDN.

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The explanation in the article is: « So you don’t have to keep version numbers in your head, we’ve put more emphasis on yes and no iconography for browser capabilities »

But as far as I can tell all they've done is put a tick there if any version of the browser supports the feature.

That means I could have learned the same information from the old table just by looking at whether the cell had anything in it, with no version numbers "in my head" at all. So I'm feeling patronised rather than helped.

If they'd done a bit more work and made the ticks indicate something like "available in the oldest supported version of the browser" (which is a recent version for Firefox and Chrome but not for Safari), that might have justified what they wrote.

It’s a bit surprising that the linked article isn’t more carefully written to explain choices, given the audience. As you say, the reason given doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

> So you don’t have to keep version numbers in your head

But.. THAT'S WHY I'M LOOKING AT THE FRACKING CHART!

I’m almost sure this was done for accessibility reasons. For some people, red and green are the same color.

That actually makes sense. There's no reason they couldn't have done a check mark/giant X along with the version number, though.

As a person with red-green colorblindness, I doubt it. The previous version was fine as had an impossible to miss shape-based indication (the X across the cell).

I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that this was done with colorblind people in mind, I've seen many designers blur the line between accessibility and aspects of their design preferences they tell themselves are about accessibility.

Not being able to see browser version numbers at a glance in the Compatibility Chart really reduces the usefulness. I know I can click on a box to see which version a feature was added, but for certain APIs like MediaRecorder (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaRecord...) this is a lot of clicking! There are subtleties like `pause` being implemented in Safari 14.1 where the rest of the API was implemented in 14.0 I've been bitten by this.

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