This sounds like a perfectly reasonable compromise. (Sorry, just noticed it upon re-reading the thread). In that case, is there any possibility of prioritizing this ahead of the newer features, and postponing this deprecation until the new HTML mode is available? That way you can have your new features AND you don’t lose old users.
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This is not strictly true, BTW. Most OSes don’t peg their browser to the OS 1:1, but Firefox and Chrome in particular limit what versions can be installed on old Windows and Mac computers.
Firefox ESR won’t go beyond 115 for those machines. Chrome stops at 109. Both are getting the banner.
It isn’t just old iPhones but older desktops and laptops too, many of which are perfectly usable (if vulnerable, yes) and otherwise work fine with the boring parts of the web that boring old people still use. It’s some of those same people who are still using forums instead of, say, Discord or whatever the kids are on today. And it’s them who are getting hurt by this change that prioritizes developer experience over user needs.
Discourse, and most of the web, has been working fine without needing relative colors, lookbehinds, or sub-grids. Somehow we got by. There was always a need for new features, but that was responsibly balanced by graceful degradation, excluding users only when no alternative was possible – which shouldn’t be very often when a software’s fundamental job is to show text posts with a few images.
I know many of us techies like to stay near the front of the curve, and we’re used to chasing that ruthless bleeding edge, but it cuts both ways. In this case it’s hurting real users who rely on Discourse not just for a profitable modern experience, but for being able to stay connected to their long-time communities.
It’d be one thing if this were a critical security issue that could not otherwise be fixed. But it sounds like just a minor improvement in devex (please correct me if I’m wrong) that’s more about making future development easier and faster. In that case, does it have to be so urgent? Two weeks notice? Surely it wouldn’t do much damage to wait a few more months, put out a basic HTML
mode first, and forever make future deprecations that much more stomachable for everyone?
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I’m sorry, but Windows 8.1 is from 2013 (the release year of Discourse 1.0) and has been officially end of life for two years now .
Macos 10.14 is more recent, but its successor Catalina runs on all Mac devices released since 2015.
You simply have to draw a line somewhere.
Discourse has had high browser requirements since the start. Here’s the line from the announcement of Discourse:
Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
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Yes, but the line isn’t an arbitrary line in the sand. There’s nothing particularly magical about 5 or 10 years. Browsers adopt features incrementally, and developers can similarly balance the cost and benefit of each one they choose to use, or not.
In this case I’m arguing that the substantial cost to a small subset of users is possibly still greater than the seemingly small improvement to developer experience – especially if an alternative were available, such as postponing the features until a basic mode or theme is available.
Have you considered dual booting Linux? Or even just running it on a flash drive?
In theory from what David said about Firefox 115 that Mozilla has extended security updates for awhile yet.
It does suck when OSes and old software discontinued support. But is inevitable. This is where Linux often comes to the 
.
While not recommended as it poses security issues. I believe you can lock your discourse instance from upgrading. But then any issues/bugs will remain in place. Maybe a more advance warning of using outdated browsers could be more advertised that it will brake at some point with possible ETA.
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This literally describes the older operating systems which don’t support modern browsers.
They’re unpatched, unsupported, and wide open to exploits.
Removing (implicit) support for 9 year old devices and 15 year old operating systems is not “chasing the bleeding edge”.
The older computers can use modern browsers just fine. It’s the operating systems that users are choosing to stay on that can’t. I suggest introducing them to Ubuntu or Mint. If all they need is a web browser, this would work great. If they need more, the basics are probably already there as well.
If that’s not an option, seems there is a project out there called supermium dedicated to maintaining a modern Chromium-based browser on older Windows systems.
Neither I nor CDCK explicitly endorse this supermium project; we have no idea if this will work, trash your computer, or send all of your computer’s data to the KGB. Of course, if you care about the data on your computer, you shouldn’t be running Windows 7 / 8.
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if you cared about the data on your computer, you wouldn’t be running Windows 7 / 8.
This is a fairly offensive assertion in a community whose guidelines I see advises each poster to “be kind to your fellow community members” and encourages them to “criticise ideas, not people”. I am glad that your position and communication style do not seem to be representative of the CDCK team as a whole, and that there are plans underway to mitigate any unnecessary loss of compatibility for those in the community, who for various valid reasons, are unable to use operating systems which support updates to the recent browser versions advertised in the warning message.
Thank you for the link to supermium which is very helpful.
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This is fair and I’ve toned down my post a bit.
A lot of my frustration over this is borne by seeing too many rants[1] about “Microsoft ruined Windows after Windows 7 and I’m never going to upgrade!” and then complaints when we “stop supporting Windows 7” years after it’s no longer supported by Microsoft.
the latest one, ironically, on the Brave community itself, though that topic is where I found the supermium link ↩︎
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I am sorry but unless you’re using a very proprietary device. You can almost always boot a Linux OS. And you don’t even need to install it as there are various ways.
- Dual Boot
- Virtual Machine
- boot off of Flash drivem. Some are even designed to be a full is on a usb stick.
And Linux is free.. so cost is not an issue.
If you’re really wanting a Windows based on NT. Well there is the long project ReactOS.
If people are going to continue to run Windows XP, 7 & 8. At least use an old computer as a proxy server running Linux.
Funny thing was Windows 10 was supposed to be at one time the last Windows with moving to a supposed Rolling release. And we know that didn’t last.
The good with Linux is generally all your old programs can still work. Vs Windows that removes compatibility with even simple production programs like Print Shop etc..
You can even run old DOS programs in Linux.
Linux rarely removes compatibility with old programs. And is often due to this what keeps old hardware running long after it is abandoned either because a company has collapsed or simply moved on with new iterations & direction.
My youngest PC ATM is about 8 or 9 years old. Old Intel i5-6500 and a Ryzen 7 2700x. Also have some DDR PC computers as well.
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And also hardware, like scanners, thanks to SANE.
Without Linux, my scanner would have been only a piece of plastic for way more than 10 years! As not supported after Windows XP (I guess same problem with Macintosh), but still continuously supported by all and until latest Linux.
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As an admin of a self-hosted install, is there some way that I can disable the browser version warning (and the eventual version block)? I would prefer to let the site degrade for those on older devices instead of blocking them entirely.
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It won’t be an entirely block. Those users can’t log in nor reply, but otherwise they can read. The look will be more… minimalistic.
It’s not for me — I’m on a recent computer that runs Discourse fine. It’s for other users of a forum I’m a part of. Trying to convince them to adopt Linux is probably an uphill battle, lol. It’s hard enough to convince my parents and other people I know to switch (and then you end up having to play tech support for them). I’m not going to try to talk a stranger over the internet into doing that 
But yes, Linux would be a great option for the tech-savvier users of old computers. Sadly, many of those users are on older machines and OSes because they’re not very tech-savvy, or are just tied to their preferences.
They are quaint and old-school that way, but that doesn’t mean I want to exclude them from the communities I’m a part of.
Is this possible even for hosted Discourse Cloud instances? If so, that’d be a great workaround! Seems unlikely though, since that means the Cloud version will have to support multiple versions in parallel…?
First, thank you for the response. I appreciate you (and the team as a whole) even being willing to discuss this.
While you’re absolutely right that older OSes are more vulnerable, sometimes circumstances for individual users make upgrades or OS switches impractical, especially on just a few weeks’ notice (actually a little more than a month, not just two weeks, sorry I miscounted). And it’s not like come May 2nd, users who don’t upgrade to the newest OS will suddenly have their machines join a botnet and explode. Their browsers will keep working, most other websites will keep working, they just won’t be able to post in Discourse forums anymore. Yes, they may eventually succumb to some vulnerability or another, but that probably would’ve been years later than May 1, 2025.
In this case, you’re not really deprecating any particular OS or on any sort of specific timeline anyway. You’re adding three very specific browser features that are not critical to any existing functionality and will have no immediate user-facing impact. Colors can be calculated differently, layouts can be approximated with other CSS tools, and I have no idea what the lookbehind is going to be used for, but there are likely workarounds for that too.
I think comparing these changes to critical OS security upgrades isn’t very fair; they are two completely different classes of changes & deprecations.
But my underlying argument here isn’t about how many CVEs or lines of code any particular change might require. It’s that Discourse is fundamentally about community, and in this case, this decision hurts community for the sake of what seems like a minor improvement in developer experience — but please correct me if I’m wrong.
The cost to the Discourse team to implement a backward-compatible posting mode is measured in dollars and hours. It sucks having to support old browsers, I know, and I and every other web dev all hate it, and I’m sure you do too. However, the cost to your users in this case is measured not just in minor inconveniences, but the very real threat of loneliness and being cut off from communities they’ve long been a part of.
Discourse isn’t just for techies who argue about the relative merits of Windows 7 vs 10 vs the Linux distro du jour; it’s used by people of all ages, across the world, with devices new and old, with different levels of tech savvy. And some of them just don’t keep up with computers and OSes the way we do. Maybe that’s less than ideal, sure, but I don’t know their whole story…
At the end of the day, yes, it’s absolutely true that you cannot support everyone forever, and eventually some software issue will absolutely force your hand and require an upgrade that will leave some small % of users behind.
But those three particular features don’t seem like such an instance. Are they truly so urgent and critical as to justify exiling some of the users who’ve been using your software the longest, with a “too bad, you can no longer post unless you want to do it all by email”?
Those three features really do seem “bleeding-edge” to me, especially for a forum software that’s been doing fine without them for years. Does Discourse really need to be more ahead of the curve than most government, bank, etc. websites? As far as I can tell, they are small incremental conveniences, not revolutionary paradigm changes in software development and maintenance… but please do correct me if I’m wrong and there is some pressing need to implement these ASAP.
But if there isn’t a pressing need… is it truly worth shutting these users out? Those three features seem to have between 91-95% browser support globally (1, 2, 3). Let’s call it 93% on average. If Discourse has 14 million users and this change negatively affects 7% of them… that’s still 980,000 people. Of course that math is simplistic and actual analytics would be better, but the point is that at Discourse’s scale, your changes are affecting real people who depend on these communities for social interaction. Are they truly urgent and necessary? They can’t wait until a basic HTML posting mode is available?
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Ah sorry, I should have been more specific… I am trying to understand the best path to retain both read and write (reply) access for users on the affected devices.
As @unknown_error highlights, the specific features the Discourse team has mentioned in this thread sound like non-critical browser abilities, and thus it should be possible to allow for a gracefully degraded page.
So, I am trying to understand the difficulty level involved in offering the existing read / write experience to the affected devices while still applying upgrades for security fixes. Perhaps there is a user agent / browser feature check that self-hosting admins can customise. Perhaps it means maintaining a fork of Discourse. I am trying to understand the level of effort involved continuing support for these browsers, as I know that multiple members of my community will be affected by this (in my view, unfortunate) decision.
To add to @unknown_error’s valid points, we’ve seen before a difficulty in a community which has a proportion of older people who are using older iPads - possibly in an institutional setting, probably in a cost-constrained setting, where they are taking presumably acceptable risks, hopefully not attempting banking or other high-value activities, and are being disenfranchised when older browsers become unsupported.
I welcome any and all efforts to keep the forum functionality working for such cases, even if the presentation is not so slick.
My understanding of the culture in the Discourse team is that the software will always be moving aggressively forward - it’s not a consolidating or conserving kind of organisation, for better or worse. Hopefully it can show itself to be a caring culture: it’s the less fortunate who are running older browsers, for whatever set of reasons.
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Yeah even with super easy Distros like Bodhi. I would recommend watching this project Discorkie and even reach out to the DeV there. As his standalone app for Windows may work on the older window versions and as it doesn’t load html, Js, CSS from what he has said in that thread.
It may give support to still access the forums with these old OS. It is a multi discourse.forum interface that gives a bit of a discord feel.
On Linux it is available as a snap & flatpak. So the app may have all dependencies more or less built in
Being hosted not sure but not likely supported due to not being able to guarantee security and such. So likely would need to be self hosted.
Discourse isn’t supporting the most updated Firefox ESR. I just updated that on an old Mac Mini; it updates to 115.22.0esr and I’m still seeing the message that I’ll be effectively thrown off the boards – I don’t want to just read in the Straight Dope community, I want to be able to post there.
I can’t afford a new computer. Please don’t bother telling me that a new Mac Mini is “only” $599 – I’m scraping to buy groceries.
Is it? How many people currently using message boards are upset about the current color quality?
But not log in and post, I gather. It’s not possible to be part of a community if all you can do is lurk.
Yes, indeed. Thank you, and thanks to others pointing that out.
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While only the Discourse team can provide definitive answers about their culture, I have to say, that’s not the impression I get. It seems that effectively, all major browsers are supported as long as they are supported by their developer/provider. And that seems like a reasonable and balanced approach given that overall, the web tends to move fast.
There is probably be a bit of a gray area regarding Firefox ESR 115 with it’s extended maintenance period until August, but I’m not sure how much that would help people who have users on out-of-maintenance operation systems.
So it sounds like the “real solution” would be either an LTS/ESR version of Discourse or a “maximum compatibility” version with less requirements. Which makes me - and that’s mainly why I comment - a bit worried how much development capacity it would eat up that can then not be used to develop new features and make sure that Discourse continues to evolve with the rest of the web (because I feel that is one of the reasons why Discourse has stopped the steady decline of forums, at least to a certain extent).
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That’s right. DisCorkie does not load any kind of html in any kind of web view. Which is good because if does not suffer from instabilities and breaches like old browsers.
Being very honest, I’m not sure how it would behave in older windows machines because I haven’t tested in this environment. But, theoretically, you should not face any issue because of that
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Can you share you Mac Mini model version and your Mac OS version?
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