Six years ago (in 2012), I was looking for a newsletter about browser releases. At the time, my motivation was to test and update the jQuery TestSwarm framework for each new browser release. I found a simple overview at browsehappy.com, by @WordPress. (1/)
Lacking RSS, I decided to simply check it on a regular basis, and created @browsehappy on Twitter for others also looking to follow browser releases, with links to relevant blog posts and documentation. Then, one day… (2/)
One day, Chrome’s version number was missing on Browse Happy’s homepage. Browse Happy is open-sourced at https://github.com/WordPress/browsehappy, which helped me find that its data actually comes from Wikipedia! Specifically, it scraped markup from article infoboxes, and extracted the version with some string operations. (3/)
Those string operations made assumptions about the wiki’s internal templates, which no longer held up after some edits to the Google Chrome article on Wikipedia. This repeated itself a number of times… (4/)
I helped them to use Wikidata.org as the source for version numbers instead.
Many Wikipedia statements are now maintained on Wikidata, which can be queried and displayed directly on articles. (5/)
Also… browser vendors have boosted their comm efforts a lot since 2012!
Opera started at blogs.opera.com/desktop
Edge started at blogs.windows.com/msedgedev
WebKit renewed their blog at webkit.org/blog
Chromium/Mozilla continue at blog.chromium.org and hacks.mozilla.org (6/)
After three years of moderating the feed I took a break, and never got back. TestSwarm no longer had its own browser detection, and for web-dev interests, much better newsletters sprung into existence. Main one for me is webplatform.news, by @simevidas. (7/)
Back to @browsehappy.… as part of digital spring cleaning, I decided I shouldn’t be owner @browsehappy on Twitter, especially given it’s now dormant. I’ve reached out to @Automattic and worked out a transfer. (8/)
Good bye @browsehappy, and welcome @Automattic! (9/9)
Originally published on twitter.com.