Dropping iOS 15 & other old browsers in May 2025

Announcements
1

From 1st May 2025, Discourse will start using some modern browser features which are unavailable on iOS 15, and some other old browsers.

Discourse’s minimum supported iOS version will be updated from 15.7 to 16.7. After that, visitors using older versions of iOS will be shown a basic-html version of community content, and won’t be able to login or interact with the site.

Devices limited to iOS 15 are the iPhone 6s, iPhone SE (gen 1), iPhone 7, and iPad Mini 4. These were all released more than 9 years ago, and are no longer updated by Apple (see iosref.com). Unfortunately, it will not be possible to interact with Discourse on those devices going forwards.

For more recent iOS devices, the OS should be updated to iOS 16.7 or higher.

This change will also affect older versions of other browsers. The minimum Firefox version with support for these features is v128 (July 2024), and the minimum Chrome(ium) version is v119 (Oct 2023).

From today, we’ll be rolling out a warning banner for affected users, with a link to this topic.

On the technical side, the features we’ll be requiring including relative color syntax, subgrid, and lookbehind regex, all of which will enable improved experiences for Discourse users.

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I am on kiwi 132, why i receive this alert?

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If you’re seeing the banner, then it means that your browser is missing support for one of these three features:

If you open the developer console, you should see a red message which includes true/false values for each of these.

Our headline here is “iOS 15”, because that’s the most commonly-used browser that is missing these features. But the change also applies to other browsers which are missing the same features.

Unfortunately, it looks like Kiwi has been officially discontinued :cry:

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as web developer.. i understand but i think this a very sad announcement.

to not be able to open a “text” website with a device 10 years old…

arent’ there alternatives?

an html only theme for old devices?

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It’s expected in Discourse’s development – at least if you’re familiar with Discourse operational approach.

The design choice is to be optimized for the latest technologies without being stuck in extensive support for “old” software (I agree that “old” in this context is not exactly “old” and like many I don’t like to be forced to acquire new devices every X years :cry: ), and there have been many similar announcements and discussions in the past. For example:

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Yes, we have a basic-html view which works on all devices. That will continue to be available for iOS15:

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this is it. thank you!

(i am very worried about future preservation of information… I’m also keeping a local only markdown version of my community contents using the powerful Discourse’s APIs and custom python scripts like these)

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8

May I ask why? :thinking:

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For anyone who’s curious about Chrome specifically, it looks like Chrome 119 (November 2023) is the cutoff:

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10

Yup, and for Firefox those features are supported from v128 (July 2024).

But worth noting: both Chrome and Firefox are ‘evergreen’ browsers. The vast majority of users are automatically kept on the latest versions.

Our official policy on those is that we only support the latest released version. (although of course, Discourse ends up working on older versions, until some new feature is required)

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Makes sense!

Do you have any troubleshooting advice for mobile android browsers? For context, I’m trying to help a user who’s seeing the banner. They say they’re on Chrome 134.

The only way to access the developer console to see what’s getting flagged that I can find involves USB tethering which seems like a bit much to try to walk someone through!

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If you have them navigate to something that reflects their browser headers back to them, it might help to verify their claim. For example I have this function available on a webserver of mine (https://www.supermathie.net/reflect/headers):

accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7
accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
accept-language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.9,en;q=0.8,fr-CA;q=0.7,fr;q=0.6
connection: keep-alive
dnt: 1
host: www.supermathie.net
sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="134", "Not:A-Brand";v="24", "Google Chrome";v="134"
sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1
sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"
sec-fetch-dest: document
sec-fetch-mode: navigate
sec-fetch-site: none
sec-fetch-user: ?1
upgrade-insecure-requests: 1
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36

(disclaimer: this is a personal server not affiliated with CDCK, feel free to use this, or make your own if privacy is a concern)

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I don’t know if it can help; I created a personal and simple GitHub page (source) that tests as Discourse does: https://arkshine.github.io/discourse-features-test/

Images

The image displays the results of a "Discourse Feature Test" for mobile Firefox 136.0, indicating that features like Relative Color Syntax, CSS Subgrid, and JavaScript Lookbehind Regex are supported. (Captioned by AI)
The image displays the results of a "Discourse Feature Test" for mobile Firefox 136.0, indicating that features like Relative Color Syntax, CSS Subgrid, and JavaScript Lookbehind Regex are supported. (Captioned by AI)1440×2960 204 KB

The image displays the results of a feature test for a web page, showing that the browser is Huawei Browser, running on Blink engine with Android OS and supporting JavaScript Lookbehind Regex but not Relative Color Syntax or CSS Subgrid. (Captioned by AI)
The image displays the results of a feature test for a web page, showing that the browser is Huawei Browser, running on Blink engine with Android OS and supporting JavaScript Lookbehind Regex but not Relative Color Syntax or CSS Subgrid. (Captioned by AI)1440×2960 327 KB

The image is a screenshot of a web feature test indicating browser support features for Relative Color Syntax, CSS Subgrid, and JavaScript Lookbehind Regex, with successful support on Blink engine version 134.0.6998.89 of Chrome on a Windows 11 operating system. (Captioned by AI)
The image is a screenshot of a web feature test indicating browser support features for Relative Color Syntax, CSS Subgrid, and JavaScript Lookbehind Regex, with successful support on Blink engine version 134.0.6998.89 of Chrome on a Windows 11 operating system. (Captioned by AI)919×879 24.1 KB

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I’m sorry but a +1 or thumbs up does NOT convey how cool this is @Arkshine thank you

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@Arkshine, thank you so much for whipping together the test page! I passed it along and the user was able to solve their problem without needing any more help.

Sure enough, it sounds like there was a second, out-of-date browser in the mix :wink:

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Dropping support for 2 year old browsers is not what I expect from major websites.

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Having a phone that has not ran updates for 2 years is incredibly risky

A lot of this is on Apple , they sold devices 9 years ago, and no longer want to maintain them

3 Likes
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There are also other reasons to use older browsers:

  1. Lack of support for telemetry-free versions of operating systems (Windows);
  2. Dropping of Manifest V2 support in Chrome;
  3. Decision to start selling user data by Mozilla.
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19

Isn’t the proper solution to this a move to Linux (on the desktop)?

It’s pretty unsafe to use older unsupported browsers for, e.g. internet banking.

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20

You should absolutely complain about these things to the relevant companies.

Keep in mind that not updating is still a losing situation, because you’ll miss out on patches to critical security flaws (which allow remote code execution without user input).

Both Firefox and Chrome have fixed such vulnerabilities within the past week:

Attackers were able to confuse the parent process into leaking handles into unpriviled child processes leading to a sandbox escape.
The original vulnerability was being exploited in the wild.

If a Windows PC user with the Google Chrome browser (or any other browser based on the Chromium engine) clicks them, their computer gets infected with no additional action required from the victim’s side.

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