[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Support client-side rendered featured layers (#2686)

Paul Norman notifications at github.com
Wed Aug 24 19:10:51 UTC 2022


I've got more detailed numbers of WebGL 1.0 presence of viewers of the site.

On August 5th, the [matomo plugins were fixed](https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/commit/7c9a614d51617d1d88e685d0e9ea333c0c9de9b2). After that, it took up to 7 days for all users to be guaranteed to have the latest javascript in their cache, meaning numbers from the 13th and onwards have all users who loaded the matomo javascript with WebGL tests. The numbers are also stable, having shown behavior before then of growing usage as caches expired. This was the cause of some earlier numbers, although the general trend of which users had more support was accurate.

Over the 13th to 23rd, the average WebGL support for the front page was 98%, and the average support for users who are editors was 92%. To try to break down where the users are coming from without WebGL, I looked at some segments. Chrome users are 93%, Firefox users are 94%, and Windows users are 94%. For the purposes of Matomo's identification, Chrome users are almost entirely Windows, Mac, and Linux users. Android users **normally** are classified as Chrome Mobile.

I speculate that the percentage of WebGL users is lower among desktop users than mobile users, as that seems to be the only variable that would correlate with those breakdowns. I'm adding segments to test this, but it doesn't seem critical for this issue.

There is a weak day-to-day variation in the numbers, with support being lowest on Friday at 91% among editors, but I would want more data before coming to any strong conclusions there. Similar correlations with date are found among all segments.

All of these numbers are among users who load piwik/matomo. Certain setups (e.g. Brave browser in strict mode) will load neither.

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The rest of this is more opinion-based. At 98% of users, I think it's okay to have a WebGL layer as a default layer, but with editors at 90%, I think we need to maintain support for non-WebGL users, likely with maplibre-gl-leaflet. The priority of the site is to support people editing, and desktop users are more likely to be editors.

I am skeptical that the numbers will change significantly in the future, but we can see in a few years if they have changed.

I believe these are the first published numbers on real-world WebGL support, rather than theoretical support by browsers, ignoring drivers and other issues. The latter are not reliable. Interestingly, [browser support numbers](https://caniuse.com/webgl) suggest higher desktop support (99.52%) than mobile (97.79%) support, but we observe the reverse.

The numbers suggest that for someone developing a browser-based OpenStreetMap editor targeting mainly desktop users, excluding users without WebGL excludes more users than something like excluding Safari users.

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