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Comment by gizmo686 | Hacker News Reader

But if Ford found a major safty defect in the airbags of old models, people would expect a fix. Even under normal conditions, people expect Ford to continue supporting the old models, which don't become significantly less safe then they were originally.

What is going on with browsers (and other software) is weird. There is no support window on the product beyond "until we get you the next versions. Upgrades are free, and you normally don't even notice when we upgrade. Also the old version is significantly less secure then it was a month ago, even though it hasn't changed at all."

Nothing about this situation is intuitive to a non expert.

Even as a proffesional, I find it supprising that we do not see any LTS browsers given that they are essentially self contained operating systems.

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My understanding is that Firefox offers LTS (the ESR versions). I don’t think the chrome team offers anything similar. In my mind the evergreen nature of browsers for the average person is a great thing, but I understand the desire of businesses in particular to have things be consistent.

In this case my understanding though is that nothing has functionally changed in the UI. The browser UI got a paint job, not a redesign. To the average person chrome upgrades don’t actually change much visually.

To keep up the car analogy, the security race is like if the Ford was aware of safety defects so in the middle of the night every month the came and silently fixed them. Occasionally they’d also replace the bumper or the speedometer. It’s still a speedometer and still behaves like one, but it appears slightly different.

And once in a while they’ll replace the whole body of your car with the new version that you hate.

The more apt car analogy might be that you lease it, and the dealer sneaks in and replaces your 2016 with a 2017, then your 2017 with a 2018, and you don’t mind, that’s the terms of your lease agreement with them.

And then one day they replace the 2018 with a 2019 and you’re not happy anymore because the 2019 looks like ass.

But there’s no option corresponding to “buy a car instead of leasing it” so this is what we’re all stuck with.

> But if Ford found a major safty defect in the airbags of old models, people would expect a fix.

If Ford gave everyone a new car as compensation nobody would complain they didn't fix the old one.

FWIW I hate the new design and moved to FireFox, but I don't think chrome needs to support the old one.

Because the new one would be substantially more valuable (this is a well known quirk of the car market). If someone actually complained, I suspect Ford would be required to make them whole by either fixing the old car, or providing the cash value of the old car.

A windows 10 license is arguably more valuable than a windows 3.0 disk. Software depreciates with age just the same although for different reasons.

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