I just moved 13 posts that had nothing to do with Discourse to their thread. It has stopped being about this site. Sorry for starting the hijack.
It is not purely a Windows issue: have you tried running the current version of a browser, say Firefox, on a really old version of Mac OS? It will not run.
Speaking only to this …
Those are not things any user has any reason to understand. They are solely of interest to the people who write the Discourse software or the people who write the software libraries that Discourse uses. Adding that to your list of complaints isn’t supporting your argument.
You are almost certainly right that Discourse isn’t yet making any use of these features. And may not for some time. Heck, may never.
An issue with all modern software development is that it is not done as it was in your, and my, era as developer / architect. Nobody builds a system end to end from scratch in one language.
Nowadays every project is a large pile (like dozens and dozens) of 3rd party libraries all held together by a comparative smidgen of code they wrote themselves. And often those libraries are the thing driving the upgrade cycle. If library XYZ version 123 needs “subgrid”, then if you use that library, even if you don’t use its subgrid feature, you need to insist on browsers that support subgrid. etc.
A particular issue w SDMB is that of all umpteen thousand Discourse customers, we probably have the oldest demographic. Some decent fraction of whom are kinda poor and don’t relish the expense of buying another computer / tablet / phone. And all of whom are increasingly curmudgeonly.
Yes, it’s much simpler for any software project to stay up to date and use all the latest greatest libraries. It means they don’t need to track exactly what deficiencies their library has. I am sympathetic to Discourse wanting to assume users have modern browsers.
Modern versions of MacOS aren’t as egregiously annoying as Windows 11 appears to be, but I don’t find them pleasant. I run two computers regularly, one boots MacOS “El Capitan” 10.11.6 and the other one has “Mojave”, 10.14.6. Neither of them will update Brave to a version that can play nicely with the Straight Dope, but both can run Chromium Legacy, which can. But Chromium Legacy has a batch of unfortunate behaviors as well as lacking Brave’s ad-blocking prowess (even old Brave).
Your concerns about security and malware are legitimate but the last time I had malware actually compromising my computer, said computer was booted from a floppy disk.
ETA: I run Parallels so I also always have MacOS 12.7 running on the Mojave box, MacOS 10.6.8 on the El Capitan box, and can run Windows 10 and 11 at will. Seldom need to.
The issue I have with Discourse is that it is the outlier. When nearly all other websites can work with graceful fallback but yours won’t, that makes it hard to be sympathetic. This is especially when there’s just not anything all that special or feature rich about what it is doing. If Discord can work, despite being far more complicated, then Discourse should too.
That said, I will push back on the idea that the security stuff is security theater. There really have been a lot of exploits which have been patched since the Windows 7 days. And I don’t begrudge any software for dropping Windows 7 support in later versions at this point. It does become more and more difficult to support that far back.
And I will lightly push back on the trend of calling Windows 11 itself malware. My opinion of that OS isn’t super favorable, and I am deliberately avoiding updating as long as I can. But it is okay. You disable some annoyances and you can use it fine. I have on a friend’s computer. It’s worse in many ways, but it’s not malware, and you aren’t forced to install it for any of this. Alternatives exist for running secure, updated browsers.
(Any specifics I would have to post in the spinoff thread.)
^^^ This. I can log into my bank, access my employer Exchange Server email, join Teams meetings, and so forth on Brave. Only the SDMB sticks its nose up at me.
I have no fundamental disagreement with your argument as a broad generalization. But as always with these things, there’s a balance between useful upgrades and backward compatibility and sometimes it’s a matter of degree.
The important reality here is that of all the websites I visit, which includes large and complex sites with much more demanding functionality than Discourse, and sites with stringent security requirements, Discourse is the only site that doesn’t work with either of my primary Windows 7 browsers, Firefox and Edge.
And it’s not as if these sites are all running ancient web software. CNN, for instance, went through a major revamp and modernization of their site just a couple of years ago. I notice on my tablet, which is fairly slow, that it’s now more demanding in terms of client-side compute cycles, but both those browsers still work perfectly with it, as they do with everything else. Except Discourse. This seems to me to speak to a careless disregard for backward compatibility for no genuinely good reason.
While we’re here, which version of Brave? I’d expect the latest Brave to work, but I suspect you are using an older version (due to being on an older OS).
On Mojave: 1.57.64 Chromium: 116:0.5845.188
On El Cap: 1.41.100 Chromium: 103.0.5060.134