[webkit-dev] Experimental features review

[Maciej Stachowiak]

> On Feb 14, 2019, at 9:01 AM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at igalia.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 9:16 PM, Simon Fraser <simon.fraser at apple.com> wrote:
>> For these two, we now have them on by default because we think they are ready to ship. They still exist as experimental features so that people can turn them off for regression testing, but is the policy now to move them back to Debug features at this stage?
> 
> Well, I'm really not sure, other than that the feature is no longer supposed to be experimental once it's ready to be on by default.
> 
> I notice there is a new class of features called internal features:
> https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/235921/webkit. Perhaps that would suffice for regression testing?

I think this approach is needlessly confusing. For many features, there’s likely to be a period where the default flips, but it’s still useful for it to be switchable. Either for debugging, or because it hasn’t shipped in products yet and it is useful to compare. It would be sad if flags disappeared the moment the default flips, and likewise sad if they moved to a different menu as soon as the default flips.

(As an aside, I kind of hate experimental features being a menu like it is in Safari. Other browsers have more readable and persistent UI for this, like a special page or a settings pane. They also tend to have both default-on and default-off flags in the same place, so you don’t get lost on the day the default flips.)