Browser Pickiness as a Factor in Driving Folks Away

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(one last bit of ranting)

And on this note, there is no one single correct “magic number”. It’s always a case-by-case thing.

If you’re building something like Google Maps, with its 3D globe and satellite and street views, you need to support one set of technologies. If you’re building Photopea (free online Photoshop clone), you need some other set of advanced web technologies. If you’re a basic blog post, not so much.

Discourse is a forum. Its main job is to allow communities to send text messages to each other — something we’ve been able to do since the Usenet or vBulletin days. It isn’t some advanced, cutting-edge app that requires the latest & greatest web techs. All of its major features could’ve been (and were in fact) implemented by web technologies of 10 years ago or older, when it first came out. It’s not that different today. And other forums still have different levels of browser support and backward compatibility.

This wasn’t a company forced to upgrade due to some major security issue or performance bottleneck. They were literally adding some minor color and layout tweaks, and for those, they were willing to sacrifice a large part of their users, despite the long and numerous complaints begging them not to do this. That’s their choice.

Of course they have every right to make that choice, being a venture-capital profit-seeking enterprise who needs to prioritize growth and income and developer efficiency over a handful of left-behind users on obscure corners of the internet.

It just, unfortunately, happens to affect many of our users — more than average, probably, because our demographic skews old and stubborn (and I mean that in most loving way possible :wink:).

If we had active admins for the board still, we may have been able to take some proactive action ourselves to help mitigate those changes (such as by using an older version of Discourse — to their credit, the software is open-source). But because Discourse is moving forward and nobody on our side can modify the software or admin settings anymore, we’re just kinda trapped on this moving train, going wherever it chooses to go…

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The trouble with your self-driving car analogy is that you’re talking about something that is a vast quantum leap over what we have today, whereas the Discourse team cut off some of our community over lack of browser support for “relative color syntax, subgrid, and lookbehind regex”, something that I’m sure no user ever asked for and that I very much doubt will provide any significant benefit. This is not about supporting Javascript. It’s about remaining compatible with browsers that work on every other modern site I use.

This refers to the recent change we’re talking about here that no longer allows any standard Windows 7 browser, and locks out some Mac users, too, and knowing this pisses me off even more.

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And Discourse is W3C compliant. Older browsers that haven’t been updated aren’t. The standard changes over time, adding new features.

The issue is that Discourse insists on using cutting edge features and not including fallbacks. Instead, if the feature doesn’t exist in your browser, they redirect you to the legacy read-only version of the site and tell you your browser isn’t compatible.

I don’t like how heavy Discourse is. It uses a lot of features it doesn’t really need. It constantly reinvents the wheel in how it implements things. But it is standards compliant.

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I agree. The degree of my analogy is vastly exaggerated, but the previous analogies lacked the core mechanism - which is not just that someone is using an old car, but that they’re holding back the vast majority of people by doing so. Since those analogies lacked the core problem, they didn’t work as analogies.

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And so the solution is for the user to voluntarily install malware?

And I agree with @Reply : Fundamentally, the content here is just text, and therefore, the board should be compatible with any browser capable of rendering text. It might be really ugly with a primitive browser, and that’s OK, but it should still work.

If your content is text, it should work with Lynx. If your content is a photo gallery, it of course won’t work with Lynx, but it should work with Mosaic. If your content is a browser game, well of course that won’t work with Mosaic… but our content isn’t a browser game.

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Excellent point, and it fits with this other good observation:

I would be a lot more upset than I am if I didn’t at least have this workaround, but I had to install a special browser just to be able to access Discourse. The other browsers I mainly use (Edge, Firefox) work just fine everywhere else.

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Sometimes I wonder.

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I would suspect that the read-only version that I believe is pure HTML does work. If it doesn’t, it would be because of HTTPS—security stuff being updated.

One thing that Discourse does give that other sites often don’t is “email to post”. It only works for replies (as you have to reply to the email they sent you from the forum), but it is a neat feature.

I do seem to remember some talk about implementing a basic HTML form and log-in. That last part I would assume is the more difficult part, but if they can handle it with email-to-post…

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Thanks to @Reply for fighting the good fight over at Discourse Central.

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Um … no … I don’t think I said or even implied that. I said that keeping up with browser improvements by updating helps with security. An old, out of date browser is going to be lagging in security. How could it not?

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I dunno… sometimes it feels like “security update” is the IT version of “protecting the children” — a generic, catch-all excuse to justify whatever the vendors want to blindly push out to you.

Some of the more recent browsers (looking at you, Edge, in particular) are full of malware and adware themselves, and Chrome constantly updates itself with advertising experiments (like FLoC), not to mention blocking the older, more powerful uBlock Origin and necessitating a rewrite into the weaker, uBlock Origin Lite. Brave is full of crypto-spam. Windows 11 has built-in ads and Copilot integrations and vulnerabilities everywhere.

Ads and ad servers are some of the worst malware vectors, especially compared to the comparatively rare zero-click zero-day exploits. An older Chrome or Firefox with the full-blown uBlock Origin is probably safer, in my opinion, than the newest Chromes which forbid it. And then these days, with AI slop and AI malware everywhere, supply chain attacks are even more common, making bleeding-edge software and fast updates more dangerous than they’ve ever been.

“Keep your software up to date” was a useful mantra in the 90s and 2000s, but that was largely because the old security models of Windows 95 and XP etc. were so bad. From Windows 7 onwards, and especially once Chrome took over from IE6, those vectors became a lot less common. These days, I don’t think frequent updates are necessarily the best advice anymore, and more often than not they will include new advertising and tracking and performance killers and anti-features more than genuine major security updates. When the corporate tech culture is predominantly “move fast and break things” in pursuit of profit and growth, users shouldn’t feel a need to keep up just because the companies want to push more ads onto them and use “security” as a cover story. Most of the day-to-day desktop software we use have long since jumped the shark and are well on the road to enshittification. They’re not gradually getting safer, they’re gradually getting shittier.

IMHO online security is way more often impacted by personal browsing habits (of which good ad blocking is #1) than the relatively rare remotely-exploitable browser or OS exploits. That’s not to say you should go out of your way to avoid updates, but that if you’ve been using the same old apps for years or decades and they’ve worked fine and continue to work fine… then you’ll probably be OK for quite a while longer unless you suddenly change your habits. Some security stuff is legit, but a lot of it is just corporate propaganda and scare tactics because companies don’t want to keep supporting older versions.

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You’re generally right and you clearly know more about me what’s happening with the discourse dev team specifically. there are definitely instances where the cutoff happens because of convenience rather than necessity. But I stand by the general principle that once something starts becoming used by only a tiny fraction of the user base - especially if they could just… update if they wanted to - there comes a reasonable point where you can drop legacy support. Really, where you should. Of course this may differ depending on the context. If we’re talking about keeping a 20 year old pacemaker running that’s a different story than someone who could just update to a newer windows or buy any phone from the last 10 years.

I remember a few people whining on reddit when steam officially dropped windows 7 support, and hey, yeah, that does suck for them. But when you read the steam hardware survey, it affected something like 0.1% of users - one in a thousand. And you can even reasonably wonder then - if it’s not security or even “necessary”, is your dev time better spent keeping those people in the system or just adding new features for the other 99.9%? There has to be some point where a cutoff makes sense in almost every case.

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Yeah, that’s what I meant earlier when I said that no vendor can support 100% of its older users forever, and each one has to decide what % is right, whether it’s 99.9% or 90% or something lower. At the end of the day it is a matter of limited resources. Supporting old software is expensive, and the longer you do it for, the more expensive it becomes, and that takes away money and dev time from other improvements that could be made. Every company or app just has to find the number that makes sense for their audience.

But my underlying argument is that more often than not, in the case of big tech, this is a deceptive picture painted by unscrupulous vendors whose goals are not aligned with those of their users.

Microsoft artificially limited older computers from being able to upgrade because they wanted to push sales of new hardware and the Copilot button. There was not even supposed to be additional Windows versions after 10 (Why Microsoft is calling Windows 10 ‘the last version of Windows’ | The Verge) — it was supposed to become an evergreen operating system as a service, similar to how Chrome works. Then, of course, profit motives took over and they decided they needed to invent some bullshit or another in order to force more Windows and hardware sales. Planned obsolescence, not security necessity.

Same with the Discourse case (in particular): some bullshit developer quality-of-life improvements that could’ve easily been worked around were not worth sacrificing so many many users for, IMHO.

Steam, on the other hand… I have less sympathy for. If there’s any tech subculture that should be accustomed to frequent updates, it’s gamers. Though I suppose there’s probably also some portion of “casual” gamers running simple games on integrated graphics cards, and that’s gotta suck for them.

My cynicism is because this sort of attitude is not universal among software or software companies. The backward compatibility of open-source Linuxes, for example, tends to be a lot better despite having 1/1000 the resources of Microsoft or Google. Mozilla does a better job of it, too (though they, too, still cut off older OSes eventually). Small-time solo niche app vendors are also less likely to force unnecessary upgrade cycles like this, both because they live and die by their reputation and because they don’t have the giant teams inventing useless anti-features that bigger corps have.

It’s not like the sandboxing models of newer x86 processors is so vastly improved over the older ones, or that the Windows APIs have gotten so much better since the Windows 7 days (if anything they’ve just enshittified themselves, too… there’s not even a standard Windows UI kit anymore, just ten competing ones caused by Microsoft’s competitive internal politics). You can still write an up-to-date secure browser that can run on Windows 7 using decade-old hardware. Companies just choose not to because it’s not where their priorities lie.

They don’t profit from stability. They’re constantly battling each other and their own internal teams to chase the latest and greatest to get more investment and promotion and name recognition. That’s the culture that spawns endless needless upgrade cycles and users are downstream of that. That they’ve successfully convinced so many users to keep upgrading is a product of their marketing department, not because the actual security has gotten so dramatically better or because the new features are just totally worth it.

It’s really more of a rant against planned obsolescence, I guess. It’s just that planned obsolescence has become so normalized, under the guise of security and features, that we don’t even see it anymore and just accept it as the normal course of life. IMHO we shouldn’t.

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On the other hand, you also have companies like Apple, whose stance on backward compatibility is best summarized as “fuck you, pay us again”. Every few years all the old apps just stop working, full stop, when they change architecture and stop supporting the Rosetta emulator of the decade. And yet they do just fine :sweat_smile: At least Discourse and Microsoft are nowhere near that bad.

Everything is disposable now. And as much as I love my Apple Silicon Mac, it’s still sad to see.

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I actually think Apple generally does right by their mobile customers. For the longest time they gave by far the longest OS update support to their phones in the industry. I think they still do, but some others have caught up. The famous performance throttling to preserve old batteries was misinterpreted by the public (who are eager to hate apple) as planned obsolescence - but it was actually the opposite. old batteries cannot generate the same voltage they were as they were new - that’s just physics - and there are some cases when the peak power draw of a CPU would require the voltage of a new battery and things could crash when an old battery couldn’t provide it. So their change was actually user-protective and legacy support - it throttled the maximum power draw so that systems with old batteries would be more stable.

But they’re not universally good for this. My aunt asked me to wipe her old imac from 8 years ago to donate it. It was one of those units where the whole computer is built into the back of the monitor. I thought - huh - well, that old hardware is getting obsolete, but this is still a great monitor. Surely you could put in an HMDI, thunderbolt, or DP cable and use this as an external monitor for a modern laptop, right?

And no. I mean, there’s no reason you couldn’t. But Apple deliberately crippled it from receiving external display signals exactly so you wouldn’t be able to do that, so you’d be forced to discard it and buy a new one.

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In order to install the latest browser updates, you have to install a recent version of Windows. Which is malware.

I still run Steam on Windows 7. I don’t know what “officially dropping support” actually did, but what it didn’t do was stop my games from working, apparently just the same as they always did.

The annoyance that is Windows 11
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I may be misremembering. Maybe it was windows XP. They did something that made steam not run on that OS anymore because the newer frameworks steam integrated had no windows [whatever] version.

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In theory, but not necessarily to an extent that matters, and furthermore, “up to date” browsers can in many respects, including security, be worse than the older ones. Also, Firefox on Windows 7 is still getting updates under the ESR (Extended Support Release) program, but only security updates, not functional ones.

I agree.

Furthermore, I don’t think Windows 11 would install on the current desktop even if I wanted to go down that road, but it’s a fast quad-core i7 that is very stable and very quiet and runs Windows 7 beautifully – a fine OS that does everything I need and just works with a minimum of obtrusiveness. Why would I give all that up just for some ridiculous obscure new browser requirement imposed by Discourse?

Another thing that pissed me off recently is that because I read and post on the SDMB quite a lot, the Supermium browser I have to use for Discourse compatibility tends to be open all the time, and this browser has some issues, notably, as I found out recently, its Oauth 2 support is buggy. As noted in another thread, the other day I tried to sign in to a website using “Sign in with Google” and was put through a set of annoying additional security checks when that authorization apparently failed. All this hassle just because Discourse now insists on browsers supporting “relative color syntax, subgrid, and lookbehind regex” which no one asked for or needs, and that few users even understand!

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There was a big announcement that they were ending Windows 7 support, and when I ran anything Steam-based, it gave me a countdown of the number of days until it ended. But when the countdown reached 0, there was no noticeable difference on my end.

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13 posts were split to a new topic: The annoyance that is Windows 11