12 ms·

Not if it breaks old web pages out there. It's nice that we can still browse websites that haven't been updated for a decade or more.

• c7DJTLrn 4y ago
  Compile or download an older browser. We can't keep backwards compatibility forever or software is just going to get worse and worse.
  • TJSomething 4y ago
    You can't safely use old browsers on the internet. Heck, you can't really safely connect old anything to the internet.
    • jraph 4y ago
      > you can't really safely connect You can remove "safely" for old enough browsers. They will refuse to connect because of old certificates, or won't be able to understand new ciphers.
  • danmur 4y ago
    What do you mean, Windows is getting better and better :P
    • dx034 4y ago
      To be fair, they were the best example of backwards compatability for decades. They broke some of that with Windows 11 spec requirements, but it's still one of the things Microsoft is quite good at.
  • pjmlp 4y ago
    There are lots of stuff out there where the browser cannot be updated.
  • account42 4y ago
    We can very easily keep backwards compatibility forever at no ongoing cost by layering compatibility mechanisms on top of newer standards. No reason to deprecate <blink> or <marquee> if you can just express them in terms of CSS animations in the default stylesheet. But most of the time it makes sense to pay a bit of maintenance cost because it is worth it to actually improve the ways we access old content rather than just not regressing. In fact, often backwards compatibility is what keeps things from getting worse because the current environment would have never allowed something as good if it wasn't already entrenched. A good example of this is EMail - big tech has no interest in interopability and aside of upcoming laws forcing them there is no way that a federated communication system like EMail would have any chance today.
• petepete 4y ago
  This is probably a good case for a compatibility mode where these APIs are enabled.