Showing multiple Blink-based browsers makes metrics nonsense

[gsnedders]

As long as both Chrome and Edge support something, the displayed Blink-based browsers can no longer have a lone omission or lone removal nor a browser-specific API.

[foolip]

Oh my, this is because of https://github.com/mdittmer/web-apis/pull/98. I didn't check beyond the API Catalog and API count metric, and indeed all the other metrics turn into nonsense with new Edge releases included.

There are two options:

• Revert data for new Edge and let Edge be stuck at 18.
• Try to exclude Edge from the default views and metrics.

The former is a lot quicker. @gsnedders in the way you're intended to use the data, do you have a preference?

[gsnedders]

I'd rather the latter, but the former seems practically fine given (in:chrome notin:edge) OR (notin:chrome in:edge) returns a single item: CSSStyleDeclaration#msHighContrastAdjust (and this is especially true if it's much easier to land).

[foolip]

I have pushed a new release that just deleted the new Edge data: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/

I didn't delete it from https://github.com/mdittmer/web-apis however, so I'll leave this issue open as a reminder to fix this properly.

[foolip]

This list of differences between Safari 13 and 14 might be interesting: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/catalog?releases=%5B%22Safari_13.0.2_OSX_10.15%22,%22Safari_14.0_OSX_10.15.6%22%5D&q=%22count:1%22

Because we don't have Safari 13.1 data I don't know how much is new in Safari 14 specifically, though.

[foolip]

I've made a staging release with all Edge results deleted entirely, and the metrics actually seem to work, at a glance at least: https://confluence-b2397ab-dot-web-confluence.uc.r.appspot.com/

Releasing this is tricky though, because it would break existing links including Edge results, sometimes used as evidence in https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data pull requests. To make it work, I'd need to figure out how to include Edge in the API catalog, but exclude it in metrics.

[gsnedders]

Do you not just want to add a bunch of where calls to https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/confluence/blob/master/lib/confluence/metric_computer_runner.es6.js?

[foolip]

That looks like the right place, and I tried it in https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/confluence/pull/663, but the result isn't the same as when just deleting all of the Edge data. Edge is still included in the API count graphs, and the rest are just broken.

There must be other places in metrics where "all browsers we have data for" are implicitly used, which would also need to filter out Edge. I think this is one: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/confluence/blob/578b00eae6a0b04409b7360ddb2409fb30704ef6/lib/client/api_confluence.es6.js#L77-L79

@gsnedders would you have use for the metrics for just Chrome+Firefox+Safari, or can you use the API catalog and filter to get at the same information? Despite being the maintainer I'm very unfamiliar with the code base, and am not very effective working with it.

[gsnedders]

@foolip the metrics are by far the lowest value part of this, and I think I'd be pretty happy to just see them gone if we can't make them better than nonsense. the data is then there, available, and if someone wants to make metrics out of that they can.