I don’t know, it is something I think about, but we don’t have any concrete plans at the moment, we will have to do lots of homework prior to going down a path like this
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I tried palemoon with Discourse, and it doesn’t work. It says something like ‘your browser is not supported for this forum’. The page has the default font (Times New Roman), and there aren’t any login/signup buttons.
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Well Microsoft Edge is just a chrome based now.
There are alot of privacy based browsers using Chrome Open-source code as a base.
The problem comes from evolution of software/OSes etc..
Sure things like Linux often give new life to old hardware and can often revive an old device to be able to use modern programs
Discorkie is still pretty new and ATM I believe no IOS app as of yet. The Android App is still in initial beta. It is promising if your looking for something that looks like it can be supported on older tech. It doesn’t load Js, hmtl. Iirc it pulls from JSON? And makes for a discord like feel adding discourse sites in a way akin to discord’s server channels. Discorkie Introduction Topic
It still early days like at present YouTube links don’t seem to populate.
Sure it might be nice to step back to Netscape or even Internet Explorer. Eventually everything gets replaced with newer things and direction.
There are quite a few old programs I miss. Even though with Linux/wine & dosbox can still likely spin them up.
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Please wait a little more, relative colour syntax is not even supported in some Chrome version 132, which is still ultra recent 2025 version!
Or descope relative colours.
Relative color syntax is supported since Chrome v119 (October 2023).
The posts you linked refer to Kiwi Browser, which somehow doesn’t match Chromium’s features. I’d recommend raising the issue with the maintainers of Kiwi Browser.
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Ah ok,
I’ll try to test on other browsers.
But I’ve seen some folks answering posts via email and that would include all the quoted email history and signature with it.
It did not look good.
I would prefer having minor colour issues and my browser not blocked than having to use answering by email (if it is only enabled on the form I use).
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To be honest I don’t care about a modern experience.
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Then no problem, there are plenty of alternatives that you can use, many of them also open source, maintained and unmaintained.
Sam said that Discourse needs a modern experience, and that statement is true. If Discourse fails at this, then they run out of business, and even if that happens, who would maintain and evolve a community version? Certainly not those who don’t care about a modern experience.
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The modernisation efforts actually do have an impact even for people who are happy with the current look and feel and are not particularly worried about new fancy js and css features
As time passes they allow us quite a few optimisations that can make Discourse faster to load, and generally allow our teams to remove clunky areas from the app
I get that it may be frustrating to some people, but Discourse is a large platform and we strive generally to give a very large audience an excellent experience, this is a big driver for these types of changes
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what happens if i can’t get a newer device?
will i not be able to access discourse?
As said in the OP, users on unsupported devices can still access, browse and read everything in Discourse.
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I’m assuming Android is a completely different story since the browser is not linked to the software? Like for example, Chrome can run on Andorid 8 while being safe while Firefox can run on Android 5 while being safe as well (although performance issues) compared to iOS where you upgrade the operating system to upgrade the browser?
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Exactly. iOS is the only OS we support where the browser version is tied to OS version, which is why we do not make announcements like these for every other change.
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I can find where Discourse documents the minimum standards for installing servers…
Is there a central location where minimum standards for browsers/OSes are listed?
Is there also a list of officially tested browsers/OSes?
That is in our website at What is Discourse? | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
https://www.discourse.org/about#browser
Discourse supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers and platforms:
- Microsoft Edge
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Apple Safari (including Safari on iOS 15.7+)
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This change is also causing issues for some of non-iOS users who are simply on older computers (Mac < 10.14 and Windows < 10) that cannot install and run modern browsers. Firefox ESR is currently failing those tests.
Would it be possible to at least polyfill those features, perhaps via optional plugins, so that they can continue to use the site?
It doesn’t seem right to completely cut off users of older devices for non-essential cosmetic changes (the color and grid changes) =/ Not sure what the lookbehind regex is needed for (certainly no normal poster would directly use that? is it for some sort of search/moderation function?), but taken together, they certainly don’t “enable improved experiences” if the end result is that some users simply cannot post anymore 
A view-only basic HTML mode is not good enough if it kicks them out of communities they’ve long been a part of.
I know that Discourse, like any other software, needs to gradually add new features and keep up with modern trends and such. But at its core, it’s still “just” a forum to many of its communities, and usability and stability are more important to many of us than the new shiny. Maybe the bigger ask here is for Discourse itself to have some sort “long-term support” branch that only adds critical new features and bugfixes, but otherwise prioritizes stability over recency. Some communities just can’t keep up with the pace of change happening here, especially when seemingly cosmetic ones completely exclude older devices and poorer users.
Please give this a bit more thought and patience… this is really hurting some of the users who’ve been with you the longest.
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The current Firefox ESR is v128, which was released in July 2024 and will be supported by Mozilla until September 2025. That passes all our tests.
The previous ESR is v115, which would normally be EOL by now, but Mozilla have exceptionally extended security updates for people on Windows 7-8.1. Right now it looks like they’re going until September 2025, but might extend further.
If this were possible, we would. But unfortunately these three features aren’t possible to polyfill.
Yes that’s true of all three features. They are underlying web platform features which our developers will use to improve Discourse. Users won’t use them directly.
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Unfortunately, that is only for newer operating systems. If you go through the download process, you’ll see this note:
Note: If you are using Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or macOS 10.12, 10.13 or 10.14, then please download ESR 115 in order to use Firefox.
On older OSes even the ESR won’t update past 115 and users are seeing the banner. They cannot afford a newer computer right now.
Can the changes be compartmentalized, perhaps? Is there no way to, for example, only use the new color and grid modes in new themes (while leaving the existing ones backward compatible, or vice versa, making a new simple HTML theme that rarely changes layout and doesn’t need new CSS or JS features?)
And if it’s for internal use, can’t whatever needs the lookbehind be implemented differently? There are approximations of it in JS, or the string can be sent to the Ruby backend for processing, etc.? Is there a particular place in the code where the lookbehind is required? Perhaps the community can help come up with creative solutions?
Sorry if any of this sounds argumentative. We are also trying to get the users to try alternative browsers, but not all of those will work either. It would be much easier for them if a deprecation were not forced onto them, especially with such minimal warning. Some of these communities have been around for decades, since before Discourse itself, and are suddenly faced with losing members due to a minor software tweak that no users asked for.
I know having to support older browsers makes development harder, sometimes much harder, but in this particular case… are those features REALLY necessary? Are they so important as to justify losing users, or mere shortcuts that could be approximated less painfully with a little more work, perhaps..? 
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