Following the next stable release in July 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 so they can continue to read conversations, but they will not be able to login to the site or post content.
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 These were all released more than 9 years ago, and are no longer updated by Apple (see iosref.com).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 use a browser on those devices that can log into Discourse.
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). Users who are able to update to a newer version of these browsers can do so to avoid being impacted.
For users of Windows 7 and XP who are unable to update Chrome/Firefox, you may want to consider a third-party chromium fork such as Supermium or Thorium [1].
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, lookbehind regex and import maps, all of which will enable improved performance and user-experience for Discourse users.
the original version of this announcement listed 1st May 2025 as the cutoff date. Based on community feedback, that has been pushed back to July 2025.
(note: Discourse cannot provide any guarantees about the safety or performance of these browsers). ↩︎