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Who is using a browser build that is more than 2 years old on the open web? Is that a sensible enough use case that it should be supported?

superkuh 5y ago
I do and it's perfectly sensible as a human person. It's just not a sensible design your business around people like me to make a profit, usually. That said, businesses that actually want to take your money and aren't just selling you do tend to support very old browsers. For example, I can use my browser from 2016 to browse and buy things from Amazon.com very easily. Even with JS disabled.
- shaunpersad 5y ago
  That's not sensible from a security perspective at all.
  - TingPing 5y ago
    I believe Safari is supported for roughly 1 year and they expect users to keep updating their OS because they control the OS and know it will get updates.
dmitriid 5y ago
An sufficiently large org will have a non-trivial amount of users on "outdated" (aka older than 2 years old) versions of software. Any public service (aka government site) will have a huge amount of people on "outdated" software and hardware. Also: how the f... did 2 years become "omg it's so old we're no longer supporting it"?
- fomine3 5y ago
  So they stick IE? There are no browser supported over 2 years now in same version. Good luck.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    Right now I'm in a team that doesn't expose anything to the web. However, three years ago I had a stint at Spotify and our project was exposed to the web. We would routinely get up to 3 million visitors a month from IE 11. That's more people than some countries. Any public service (at least in theory) must support browser versions significantly beyond the arbitrary 2-years-old mark.
- spc476 5y ago
  You're being generous with two years. In my experience, if it's older than 20 minutes, burn the program, salt the disk, it's horribly obsolete, you'll be hacked and your identity stolen. Oh, and by the time you've updated, it's obsolete so update again. I hate it.
swiftcoder 5y ago
Almost every government and/or military organisation in the world. Do you know how long it takes to certify a new OS for deployment on a warship?

superkuh 5y ago

I do and it's perfectly sensible as a human person. It's just not a sensible design your business around people like me to make a profit, usually. That said, businesses that actually want to take your money and aren't just selling you do tend to support very old browsers. For example, I can use my browser from 2016 to browse and buy things from Amazon.com very easily. Even with JS disabled.

shaunpersad 5y ago
That's not sensible from a security perspective at all.
- TingPing 5y ago
  I believe Safari is supported for roughly 1 year and they expect users to keep updating their OS because they control the OS and know it will get updates.

dmitriid 5y ago

An sufficiently large org will have a non-trivial amount of users on "outdated" (aka older than 2 years old) versions of software. Any public service (aka government site) will have a huge amount of people on "outdated" software and hardware. Also: how the f... did 2 years become "omg it's so old we're no longer supporting it"?

fomine3 5y ago
So they stick IE? There are no browser supported over 2 years now in same version. Good luck.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Right now I'm in a team that doesn't expose anything to the web. However, three years ago I had a stint at Spotify and our project was exposed to the web. We would routinely get up to 3 million visitors a month from IE 11. That's more people than some countries. Any public service (at least in theory) must support browser versions significantly beyond the arbitrary 2-years-old mark.
spc476 5y ago
You're being generous with two years. In my experience, if it's older than 20 minutes, burn the program, salt the disk, it's horribly obsolete, you'll be hacked and your identity stolen. Oh, and by the time you've updated, it's obsolete so update again. I hate it.

swiftcoder 5y ago

Almost every government and/or military organisation in the world. Do you know how long it takes to certify a new OS for deployment on a warship?