Striking this balance is one of many factors in determining the A-Grade membership.

The concept of A-Grade Support is predicated on trust. Perhaps the most important part of the definition of A-Grade support is that our developers and testers “actively test against A-grade browsers.”[1] Put another way, part of the value of GBS is that it “enables meaningful, targeted, and cost-effective QA testing.” [2]

Each new combination of browser/platform that receives A-Grade support is expensive because it requires time and materials to test, and development time to support.

The decision to offer A-Grade support is based on many factors concrete and abstract.

Lack of A-Grade support does not indicate anything about a browser (other than that it does not enjoy A-Grade support). To conclude that Browser Foo and Browser Bar render “closely enough to avoid testing” because Browser Foo receives A-Grade support is not valid.

Thanks,
Nate

[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/#a-grade-vs-x-grade
[2] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/#testing

That is a good example of a browser that receives X-Grade support.

Thanks,
Nate

GBS does not “shut out.” Graded Browser Support provides X-Grade support to Camino, Flock, and SeaMonkey, as well as Maxthon, Bento, IceWeasel, K-Meleon, iCab, Konqueror, Shiira and over 10,000 others.

As the GBS documentation points out, “The only practical difference between A and X-grade browsers is that QA actively tests against A-grade browsers.” I believe this is the right approach because it allows us to serve the full experience to all non-C-grade browsers while still conducting structured and rigorous QA testing.

As I wrote at the start of GBS’s definition, “in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a ‘Graded Browser Support’ strategy, unnecessary.” Based on your comment, I suspect you agree.

I welcome any feedback you have on the full GBS strategy.

David,

Thanks for the blog post and the comment!

Thanks,
Nate

I use the YUI A-Grade Chart to help draw a cut-off point for the browsers I support in my web design projects… and frankly, I’ve been wondering when you were going to update to Safari 3.

Ever since Safari 3 was released, I kept hinting to clients and colleagues that we could let support for Safari 2 slide b/c Mac users are fast to upgrade. But I didn’t feel comfortable really sticking to that declaration… until now.

More on those thoughts…

We’re not committing to a strict quarterly release schedule, but we’ll certainly have more updates than we did last year.

Thanks for the feedback.