Fyrdility

by Alexis Deveria

Archive for October, 2013

Preview the new caniuse.com features

Tuesday, October 15th, 2013

I’m happy to announce a number of new features coming to caniuse, with the new site now available for preview at beta.caniuse.com. The features are built upon a complete rewrite of the site’s front end code, which will hopefully also lead to more improvements in the future.

New features

Importing geographical usage data

Until now the site had only been using the “Worldwide” dataset from StatCounter which was useful but could be quite different from the various geographic regions that many site owners are interested in targeting. You can now pick any of StatCounter’s regions to see the support value percentage based on that region.

The first time you visit the site it will attempt to detect your current location to suggest the data to import. If you’d like to pick a different (or additional) location follow these steps:
region picker

  1. Click on “Show options” to show the option sidebar
  2. Under “Geographic usage data” start typing the region’s name
  3. Select the region and click “Import data”

The data is always from the previous month, and will be automatically loaded when revisiting the site. On a new month, regional data is automatically updated.

 New support “tables”

The support tables have been cleaned up and modified as following:

  • A “Usage relative” mode – displays each browser version sized relative to the selected usage data
  • Detailed tooltips when hovering over browser versions
  • Support for version-specific notes – easily see which notes refer to which browser versions (see flexbox for example)
  • Additional “unprefixed” usage information where applicable (% of users supporting properties etc. without prefix)

Example of the new usage relative view

Miscellaneous improvements

Smaller improvements include:

  • Import details from Google Analytics usage imports
  • Some options like browser selection are stored and restored when revisiting the site
  • Streamlined options panel
  • Improved browser comparison with subsections for common/different usage.

What about the new design?

Quite some time ago it was announced that the site would implement a new design in cooperation with Lennart Schoors. While some parts of this design have been already incorporated, the overall design is not there yet. This was due to some architectural inconsistencies between the design and the new features where I opted to get out the new features first.

The good news is that the new design is next on my list, once the new features have been put on the main site. My goal is it to have it implemented before the end of the year.

Feedback

I hope you find the new caniuse.com features useful in your web development/design work. If something on the beta site’s not working right please file an issue (use “beta site” tag) so I can fix it before pushing the new features to the main site. Thanks!

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