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.
That would be a much better analogy if 2020 were the year Windows 7 had been released.
I guess I shouldn’t have gotten rid of that Commodore 64, then.
(I do have some sympathy for your position. I still have a Windows 7 laptop that I haven’t completely stopped using; but it’s not my main computer by any means.)
Year new computers came with Windows 7: 2012, when Windows 8 was released, i think. Hmm, I’m finding references to it being available later, such as “you couldn’t buy a Windows 7 Business PC after October 31, 2016” in some random blog about the topic. Let’s go with 2016.
So, 2016 to 2026 is 10 years, nearly twice the lifespan of the typical computer. Let’s say 1.5 times the lifespan of a good computer.
So it’s as if there were places that didn’t allow you to drive your 2002 car. (2026- 16*1.5)
In the future, if we have all self-driving cars on the road, we have massive benefits. We don’t need stop lights. All the self driving cars will tell each other where they are, and they can just time it so they all just pass each other by in the intersection. Accident rates will decline 90%+
But we only achieve this if ALL cars on the road are self driving. If there are still human driven cars in the road, then self driving cars all have to drive the traditional way, with things like traffic lights, because the humans aren’t participating in their new mode of driving.
So, then, what if almost everyone accepts that all self driivng is better, but out out of every 500 cars on the road is still driven by a human? Then 0.2% of the drivers out there are keeping us using a worse legacy system, holding back the progress that comes from discarding that legacy driving mode. The 99.8% of drivers could be safer and more efficient, and the 0.2% of human drivers are bitterly talking about how they just want to be able to drive like they’ve always known.
At one point is it reasonable for the government to step in and say “okay - so few people want to drive anymore or even own cars with self driving that we’re going to just ban self-driving cars and move on to the new way of handling this?”
This is what modern javascript heavy web programs, like discourse, are doing when they decide to cut off support when <1% of people are using web browsers that aren’t worth maintaining anymore or actively block progress when they require legacy / backwards compatibility.
A good Web site should be viewable with any W3C-compliant browser. If my browser can prove W3C-compliance and your server can’t, it’s not me who needs to change things. That’s why there are standards, jeebs.
Many content presentation systems, including vBulletin, offered a “print view” that was IIRC mostly stripped of noncompliant elements. Is that an option here?
OTOH, this might also be a good place to mention text-only clients:
The W3C compliant standard is mostly for HTML, CSS, and perhaps some very basic scripting. It’s concerned mostly with a website creator being reasonably sure that the way they intend for a website to be rendered on the browser is predictable. It’s generally not held to be the standard for heavy use of more advanced scripting like a javascript heavy forum interface. The way code advances is different than the way markup advances. And how a browser’s interpreter can handle that code is a much more complex problem than rendering markup elements.
I know zero+ about this stuff. I don’t even know what I have.
Don’t you stubborn folks want fancy shiny, user-friendly or faster new systems (or whatever they’re called)?
Seems like you know a few things about this stuff. I would think you’d want to keep up with the technology today.
“It’s 2026, dumplin’, 2026” --ref. to Bette Davis in Jezebel
A nuance here is that last time this happened, when Discourse wanted to add some new thing that would break compatibility with older browsers, it had nothing to do with new features or security. They were some purely developer-facing conveniences for their own team, with zero user impact:
“improved performance and user-experience” is kind of misleading there. They’re not actually for users at all:
And as a web developer, I would (and did in fact) argue that those developer-facing conveniences were trivially minor and not worth cutting off people from communities over. My back-of-the-envelope math suggested nearly a million Discourse users would’ve been impacted by that. Their response was to delay the rollout by a few months, but that’s it.
These decisions are never a binary yes/no decision, but a continuum of “which new features do we want to add, and how many existing users would that affect”.
Whereas one company might say “Our users are paramount and we will only add something if 99.9% of our users can use it”, others might make a more pragmatic decision and say “It’s good enough if 90% of our users can use it, the remaining 10% just have to upgrade”.
I think Discourse falls somewhere in the middle of those two… for those particular features, the support is somewhere around 93%, and that was good enough for Discourse. Unfortunately, some of our own users fall within that 7% and so are simply thrown to the wolves…
It didn’t have to be this way:
But that “basic HTML” mode has not thus far been prioritized, as far as I know, and the sunsetting came first.
That’s just a corporate values thing, not a technical limitation. They could’ve chosen to do the opposite: first implement basic posting mode, THEN add those new unsupported features. But they didn’t.
Something you should consider is that using an older browser is significantly less safe because it lacks protection against modern security threats, making it easier for attackers to install malware, steal data, or hijack sessions because of unpatched vulnerabilities. Outdated browsers fail to support current encryption standards, leading to certificate errors and potential “not secure” warnings.
