I’m going to close this topic now since we’re confident in our decision and productive discussion has settled down.
While we did update our initial plan based on early feedback, I don’t foresee us making any additional changes to what we’ve since decided.
As a reminder, this change will go into effect in Discourse versions shortly after the next major release. Self-hosted sites who wish to delay this change going into effect for their own communities can choose to remain on that release, by switching to the stable branch after the next release, which will be maintained until January 2026.
Thorium provides a 100% modern browser experience on Windows 7 and up. Your mileage will clearly vary, there is not huge team maintaining this, but it is out there for you to use.
Discourse Stable 3.5.0 was released earlier this week. That version maintains support for Safari 15 and other older browsers.
The latest tests-passed version of Discourse now depends on more modern browser features, and drops a number of legacy workarounds. This brings slight performance improvements for everyone, and gives Discourse core / theme / plugin developers more browser APIs to work with going forwards.
Affected devices will still be able to browse the text-only versions of the community.