"Forced" browser upgrades?

I will tell you one thing, when my company put our foot down and stopped supporting IE, it was monumental. Supporting old tech is a nightmare, and although I feel for people who don’t tend to upgrade or are in love with IE, over other browsers, my job is much easier not supporting edge cases with a user base that is tiny.

I’m having to learn new technologies nearly every single month, and having to be weighed down by an old version, or a browser like IE was terrible.

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Heh.

Heh heh.

Things are much better than 15 years ago but if we pull up the acid3 test in Chrome, Brave, Edge (which I think all use Chromium) we get:
image
Ironically (?), IE actually scores a 99/100 managing to color the second and third squares, but failing to color the penultimate square blue.

It’s the dream.

Which is fair. It’s impossible to support everything.

IBM’s practices were something along the lines of “If you buy our hardware, you get all the software for free. And if you don’t, we break your kneecaps, geek.”

I think the actual driver is employees. And I don’t wanna point fingers, but particularly UI employees. “Fashionability” is ridiculous in the industry (as Alan Kay said “IT is pop culture”) but it’s particularly bad with UIs.

I feel like companies are more embarrassed to have an old looking website than a broken website.

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Yeah, knew that, just wasn’t sure if they were restricted to using the version of WebKit in the os (essentially just wrapping the old safari on the device with the ui) or could use a newer version of WebKit as part of the app.

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The most sinister part of it is that they are barring participation from any but the latest browsers. It’s one thing to only test new functionality with a certain preferred browser. Sometimes the new stuff will just happen to work on unpreferred browsers anyway. But Discourse is saying that it will prevent you from posting at all. It’s not the same as just not continuing to support something.

I suppose people with affected technology could just start emailing their replies. Discourse hasn’t deprecated that feature yet.

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It’s a tug of war for sure. Building applications is very difficult. Being able to choose what technogy you use and best practices, while abandoning older tech that have security concerns and outdated unsupported languages is important.

However, that being said, Apple does a lot in order to force their usebase to stay in their walled garden. They feed off of FOMO and materialism. Not everything they do is motivated by this, but they are a massive tech industry that knows how to generate wealth with these tactics.

Come over to Android, it’s great! Cheaper flagship phones, longer support, and no walled gardens causing you to have to spend a bunch of money to maintain the status quo.

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Its not supporting a decade old Safari browser that is tied to Apple iOS. Seems reasonable to me.

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Back in the 90s when I worked for a web dotcom, we were required to make sure our sites worked well in all browsers, including text-only ones. (Get that Alt tag on all images!)

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I remember surfing the web on my Amiga’s text-based browser. Way too many websites looked like this:

[Image]
[Image]
[Image][Image]
[Image]

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The name of the site/service escapes me at the moment, but I used to use a site that would show me how a page/site would load in browsers/systems that I didn’t have…

Was always eye opening (and migraine inducing)

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iOS 12/13 aren’t a decade old? :thinking:

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My quick-and-dirty image viewer is still VuePrint. I’ve had it since 1995 and I don’t think it’s been updated since about then.

It occasionally crashes on certain large images, but I can step through a whole directory of pictures by tapping the space bar, and I can crop images on the fly just by clicking and dragging with my mouse.

My music player is iTunes 10. The last version of it that didn’t suck.

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This is really the gist of my complaint. And it may be a moot point now, since I get the impression that mobile operating systems are mostly the culprit here (vs. browsers). As long as these companies/products aren’t deliberately making sites inaccessible to older browsers, I’ve got no issue.

Time does march forward, and if over the course of many years, I’ve chosen to maintain a specific browser version and a site starts breaking or malfunctioning, that’s on me.

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The devices that can’t update past them are a decade old. Take a look at the device list from the Discourse Forum shared from the @rogueamuffin

The issue isn’t the iOS, it’s devices that are so old, they can’t upgrade past iOS 13. If they were iOS 14, they wouldn’t have this discourse problem at all. But, from that link, the devices that can’t upgrade past iOS 13 are 9 years old. So you are right, not a decade, but close!

To clarify, for anyone confused. This has nothing to do with browsers. It has everything to do with iOS support. Apple forces all web browsers to use Safari as their iOS suite of applications made by Apple. Every iOS version comes with updates here and there for their suite of apps. Discourse isn’t being too technical of the why, but I can almost 100% guarantee it’s not them that is choosing to just abandon userbases on 9+ year old devices, I can say from experience it’s a pain to support and develop apps on the iOS store period, I couldn’t imagine a three year old version of an app, running on 9 year old hardware. It’s standard to provide support for 5 years in the tech industry.

I do wish that there was an option for those who don’t get FOMO but use their devices well, and aren’t buying a new device every year, but you got to be realistic, a company isn’t going to support a device Apple themselves stopped supporting. App development is far too costly. And I appreciate the heads up and hard cuttofs, it may seem harsh, but at least they are open and honest about not spending the resources to support a small percentage of their user group.

However, I do see the possibility of someone creating a workaround. But not likely something soon.

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To be fair, supporting all old versions is not feasible on any platform. There are posts elsewhere on the Internet from several years ago from Android users who also couldn’t update their device OS to run the newer browser(s). They were seeing these same warnings from Discourse and complaining pretty much the same way as above.

Some other examples: Discourse dropped support for Internet Explorer in 2020. Chrome itself dropped Android 5 support last year. (Devices that could not upgrade past that version seem to be around the same age as the iOS devices mentioned above.) Chrome will also drop Windows 7 support in January FWIW. As far as I know, none of those reasons had anything to do with Apple.

FWIW #2, I’ve also been in the situation of my-only-device has reached a form of obsolescense. It’s not fun, and I sympathize.

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Anyone on an old laptop, Linux does wonders to breathe life back into into it.

I had an 2012 MacBook Pro, that was slow as malases and no longer supported, I put a Linux distro on it, and it was able to provide a much smoother experience on really old hardware. There are Linux distros that are really light that can run on pretty old hardware.

Doesn’t help the ipad/iPhone users. But to those who love to squeeze the last drop out of their tech investments. Perhaps when you upgrade, go the laptop/desktop version instead so you can easily flash that hard drive with a Linux distro in 5-6 years when your hardware stops being supported by the latest iOS.

I’m actually glad to see others who are not upgrading every 2 years to the latest and greatest. It’s nice to see others being frugal, and wanting to not be swayed by technical jargon and smoke and mirrors, but ultimately love their technology well.

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The author of the pull quote seems like a poor communicator for the Discourse team. In the announcement thread, his attempts at clarification only cause more cloudiness.

“Safari on desktop” might have been a gaffe. I reread the OP/thread looking for a sign that it was a deliberate decision to… strengthen?.. the idea that Discourse develops for current gen Safari but, again, the author stumbles on their own replies.

Regardless, Discourse has no control over, or any say, in the choices Apple makes with their own development and release initiatives. Apple has already dropped the maintenance track for iOS 12 (which is roughly 4 years old) and they’re about to sunset its security track (even on devices that cannot update to 13 and beyond); Safari can’t waste time maintaining the iOS 12 flavors because those updates will never broadcast. Discourse, in kind, made a design decision – just as I’m sure they choose not to support other antiquated browsers outside of Apple’s ecosystem.

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I feel like the world would be a better place if all websites worked well with Lynx.

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So do a lot of visually impaired people.

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Apple’s sheen has been wearing thin for me the past few years. Their modest efforts at improved security and privacy make them the “least evil” of the big guys (with plenty of caveats), but that’s a pretty low bar to clear. Their increased focus on yearly hardware turnover is profoundly expensive and wasteful, and it’s tipping the scales away from even these meager benefits. Being unable to upgrade a mobile browser indepedent of the OS is pretty ridiculous.

I get that even that has limits – I can’t expect the latest Chrome/Firefox to run on Windows XP. But that’s what, 15 years old vs. 4-5 years?

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