Speaking strictly for myself, my everyday web browser is no longer compatible with the requirements of this board. There’s not a single website I also go to that rejects my standard web browser.
Presumably, the people who live on the cutting edge of technology aren’t having this issue, but we’re a community of geriatrics with a few middle-aged and younger participants to balance the demographics a bit.
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I find that since I have to launch a different web browser (which, by the way, has issues of its own, so I don’t want to switch overall) to glance at the SDMB, I do it less often than I used to.
All things being equal, I don’t find myself fond of whatever technical decisions made my regular web browser defunct at SDMB when everywhere else it seems to be sufficient.
Some Mac users like the Op, and Win 7 users, use very old browsers and greatly prefer it.
This is not normal, but they have their reasons. The fact Discourse doesn’t work with old browsers is a problem for them and a little weird as the browsers are still working on most sites.
Oh, I should add that I’m summarizing several prior threads on this topic that went on for hundreds of posts.
I don’t know what we can do about it, though, since our site admins aren’t really present day-to-day. They pay for our Discourse subscription, but beyond that they’re generally absentee.
And a few of us hopped over to the Discourse official forums (meta.discourse.org) to complain about it. That resulted in a delay of a few months but no ongoing major changes. It was Discourse’s official stance (I’m paraphrasing here) that they needed to move fast to keep up with technological advancements. When challenged about why a simple text-based forum needs to keep evolving when it already does its job, especially if it meant alienating existing posters, they had no real answer. Backward compatibility is just not Discourse’s priority.
If we still had active site admins, we’d have the option of staying on older versions of Discourse (pros and cons there, such as security issues) or considering a different forum software or using Discourse plugins to help mitigate some of the issues. But because we don’t, we’re pretty much stuck with whatever Discourse upstream decides to do…
You could try to hide your browser’s user agent and see if that makes anything better. But that’s only a band-aid; if Discourse actually starts using features that your browser doesn’t support, it’s just a matter of time before it stops working completely (if it hasn’t already).
If using a web browser that was updated in the last, I don’t know, 4 years or so qualifies as living on the cutting edge to you, you’ve got a pretty distorted view.
The reality is that probably well under 1% of people are going to find themselves in your shoes, so I don’t think it’s keeping the masses away from participating on the sdmb.
No, more like someone driving a 2020 model year car (the year Windows 7 support ended) being told by some state or country that they can no longer drive on the road because the car is “too old”, even though it’s perfectly legal everywhere else in the entire world. This is not quite the same as your Model T analogy.
For the curious, my reason for sticking with Windows 7 on my main desktop (even though I do have Windows 11 on a laptop) is that I love this computer – its extreme quiet, total reliability, the way I have everything configured, and the beautiful monitor attached to it. I don’t regard computers as disposable and I refuse to “upgrade” the way Microsoft would like me to (which in reality often turns out to be a costly downgrade).
I’d have a hard time using this site and probably wouldn’t bother at all were it not for the miracle of the Supermium browser, a fork of the Chromium base code that runs on Windows 7 and meets Discourse’s silly requirements. Which, just like the OP, I find that no other website I use requires – old browsers work just fine on all of them.
Speaking of which, we’re nearly a year into Discourse requiring these obscure new browser features, and so far, I’ve noticed the following:
Number of exciting and important new features implemented: 0
Number of minor new features implemented: 0
Site reliability: Same as before.
Site performance: Slower.
I wouldn’t say that’s the right analogy. Someone driving a 2020 model year car isn’t holding back the rest of the system. Javascript libraries update, new features are added, Discourse takes advantages of some of those new features. It allows them to add new features and elements, have code run faster, have pages load faster, etc. But old browsers do not support these new frameworks. So they have a choice to make - do they remain backwards compatible, or do they make a better forum software that takes advantages of new advances?
This is a balancing act. You wouldn’t want to exclude people whose browsers are 2 weeks old. But it’s pretty obvious that it’s fine to exclude people from using a browser from 2003, right? So then where’s the proper cutoff? Probably when 99.5%+ of people are on a newer browser than where they decide to make the cut.
Discourse has to make the experience worse for 99.5%+ of users to please 0.49% or less of users. It is perfectly rational to end support for old systems that hardly anyone uses anymore when keeping compatibility for them demands more work, or restricts the use of new features and developments.
Even if the SDMB hasn’t done anything to take advantage of these new developments, they often passively receive discourse upgrades, and importantly, there are often performance and security improvements that are not immediately visible to end users like new features would be.