> But what about the iPad? I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air.
> “But what was the culprit in the website,” you ask? After opening the developer tools on the Chromebook and looking at the console, I discovered the website authors were shipping JavaScript that used the optional chaining operator (?.), an unsupported syntax in older browsers that caused the entire website to fail.
[...]
> This only reconfirmed my parents’ belief that device makers deliberately make things go out of date so that you have to go buy new hardware every couple of years.
> I wanted to try and explain to my Mom that, while true for many native applications, browsers shouldn’t go out of date so easily because of hardware. “This isn’t your problem Mom. You should’t have to go buy new hardware. This is a problem with the people who make that website. They should be making their website’s code more accessible to legacy devices. Just because you don’t have a browser that can run ECMAScript 2020, you should still be able to access and use this website.”
I mean, it's been supported since 2020 in both Firefox and Chrome.
I can see a good argument for ensuring that websites will run with no javascript whatsoever as an accessibility feature. I mean, I think at least that plain text is easier to handle for screen readers most of the time. But I don't see any obligation to support 2 year old browsers, what other updates is a 2 year old browser missing? Seems insecure.
Should the 9 year old iPad air still be supported with new browser versions? Maybe. 9 years seems beyond the norm. It would be nice if devices were required to be opened up after they lapsed into an unsupported status.