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Comment by romellem | Hacker News Reader

Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash, but one thing I think is a step backwards is the Browser Compatibility table at the bottom. Previously, it had the browser version inline for the cell, now it is just a check mark. To see what version, you need to click on the cell to expand some "more info" section at the bottom.

Knowing if a feature was very recently supported or has been supported for a while is useful; now I'll need to drill down to see the information, and comparing that info across the browsers will be more difficult.

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I fully agree that the browser compatibility information used to be better. That shortened compatibility table is next to useless right now. It even shows a checkmark for features that are only going to be supported by a future (!) version of a browser. For instance, the dialog element [1] is only going to be supported in the upcoming Firefox 98 but already shows a checkmark.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di...

There's some bullshit software on my work machine that is supposed to make it so that we don't need local admin. As if that has ever worked in the past.

Upshot is that Firefox would upgrade, but forget my profile every time. That took months to sort out. Chrome simply won't update at all. Neither will Jetbrains tools, Docker desktop, you name it.

You can try to make everyone upgrade to the latest browser all you want, you're still going to have people running old versions. If you're running a free website, you are at your liberty to ignore those people. But somewhere between 5 and 7 figures a year there's a cutoff where you're going to do backward compatibility because the customer says so.

Not just this, but mozilla also supports ESR versions, where you basically get all the security patches but your browser can be almost 10 versions behind the newest release, so even with regular updates, with ESR, you'll be behind on newest features.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-esr-release-cyc...

I run a free website, and I consider it my duty to support whatever device the visitor happens to be using. Just like if I had a restaurant or a library, I would build ramps for the less than 1% who need them.

Sounds like your company takes security very seriously.

I guess the plan is:

* Randomly remove features from MDN

* See which ones people complain about most

* Reintroduce these as part of the new paid subscription

* Profit!

The relevant feedback issue appears to be this one: https://github.com/mdn/MDN-feedback/issues/20

> Change is hard, naturally there will be some inherent backlash

This is the chant of people who've set about forcing regressions on others. Usually it would just be more honest to say, "we don't care about what you want."

I'm somewhat favorably surprised they kept the version history stuff at all instead of pointing to caniuse.com, which specializes in it.

They once wrote a note over on https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/09/caniuse-and-mdn-compat-dat... about why and how they differ.

Also, caniuse.com's way of displaying the browser versions is much more helpful. It also communicates which browser versions are current, what's coming up in the next version, and so on.

Uh oh. That's one of the main things I go to MDN for. I agree.

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