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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

>Safari is the baseline in terms of web standards: The sites we develop must work in Safari versions at least 2 years old.

How can anything work reliably when software's lifetime is less than the time I can store meat in my freezer? Future shock has hit the software world hard and nowhere harder than on the web. I can understand the financial motivations for for-profit businesses and why they behave this way. And I know that's not going to change.

But as people, as human people and not just an employee fufilling a corporate person's goals, we can write, support, and use software for far longer than 2 years and we should.

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Who is using a browser build that is more than 2 years old on the open web? Is that a sensible enough use case that it should be supported?

An sufficiently large org will have a non-trivial amount of users on "outdated" (aka older than 2 years old) versions of software.

Any public service (aka government site) will have a huge amount of people on "outdated" software and hardware.

Also: how the f... did 2 years become "omg it's so old we're no longer supporting it"?

You're being generous with two years. In my experience, if it's older than 20 minutes, burn the program, salt the disk, it's horribly obsolete, you'll be hacked and your identity stolen. Oh, and by the time you've updated, it's obsolete so update again.

I hate it.

So they stick IE? There are no browser supported over 2 years now in same version. Good luck.

Right now I'm in a team that doesn't expose anything to the web. However, three years ago I had a stint at Spotify and our project was exposed to the web. We would routinely get up to 3 million visitors a month from IE 11. That's more people than some countries.

Any public service (at least in theory) must support browser versions significantly beyond the arbitrary 2-years-old mark.

I do and it's perfectly sensible as a human person. It's just not a sensible design your business around people like me to make a profit, usually. That said, businesses that actually want to take your money and aren't just selling you do tend to support very old browsers. For example, I can use my browser from 2016 to browse and buy things from Amazon.com very easily. Even with JS disabled.

That's not sensible from a security perspective at all.

I believe Safari is supported for roughly 1 year and they expect users to keep updating their OS because they control the OS and know it will get updates.

Almost every government and/or military organisation in the world. Do you know how long it takes to certify a new OS for deployment on a warship?

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