Six years ago (in 2012), I was looking for a newsletter about browser releases. At the time, my motivation was to remember to regularly check and update the jQuery TestSwarm framework as needed for each new browser release. I found a simple overview at browsehappy.com, run by WordPress.
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. I decided to pair it with links to relevant blog posts and documentation.
Then, 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.
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. Thes data issues repeated itself a number of times…
I helped them to use Wikidata.org as the source for version numbers instead.
Many Wikipedia statements are now maintained on Wikidata, which are then queried and embedded directly in articles on Wikipedia.
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
Mozilla and Chromium continue as always at hacks.mozilla.org and blog.chromium.org.
After three years of moderating the feed I took a break, and… never got back. TestSwarm no longer has its own user-agent parser, and for web-dev interests, much better newsletters sprung into existence. The main one for me is webplatform.news, by @simevidas.
Back to Browse Happy.… 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 transferred ownership.
Good bye @browsehappy, and welcome @Automattic!
Originally published on twitter.com.