Discourse is updating soon and some of the features will prevent use of the Social Music Network by older OS that cannot update the browser. I see this daily warning on the Spotify app and the Brave browser. They can’t be dismissed permanently, but there’s no way to change it. I have two older computers that can’t not be updated.
The Social Music Network is a text site. Planned obsolescence is a thing. Apple does an excellent job with this. Android too. But I am just reading and typing text on a laptop or a desktop computer. When Discourse does this update, I will no longer be able to use this network. Sorry for that.
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Hi, quick reply during a busy Saturday just to give some context:
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@anon78643841 (and anyone else interested) can you open this link and (if it’s ok) share the results with a screenshot or in text, please? This will help us understand what is the problem and maybe find solutions:
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These are the issues flagged:
Relative Color Syntax
Tests if the browser supports: hsl(from white h s l)
Not Supported
CSS Subgrid
Tests if the browser supports: grid-template-rows: subgrid
Not Supported
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Thanks for this. Also, I haven’t tried Firefox on the older devices. I do more on computers than phones as far as typing and reading text and images. I’ll check other browsers. Who knows, maybe they’ll work?
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Can you share the browser, engine, and OS versions, please? This is what helps understand what you have and what alternatives there could be.
Firefox test
Discourse Feature Test
Browser Information
Browser
Firefox 115.0
Engine
Gecko 109.0
OS
macOS 10.13
Relative Color Syntax
Tests if the browser supports: hsl(from white h s l)
Not Supported
Brave (Chrome based)
Discourse Feature Test
Browser Information
Browser
Brave 114.0.0.0
Engine
Blink 114.0.0.0
OS
macOS 10.13.6
Relative Color Syntax
Tests if the browser supports: hsl(from white h s l)
Not Supported
CSS Subgrid
Tests if the browser supports: grid-template-rows: subgrid
Not Supported
I Stopped copying after the last red flag.
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It’s some of that sugar-coated bitter medicine again. New Web platform features make life easier for developers – but they also push users to upgrade. And the cool new stuff often comes packaged alongside some user-hostile anti-features: like how they’re trying to hobble adblockers (“Manifest V3”) in the name of better extension sandboxing (itself a legitimate concern) – or how newer Ableton requires newer Windows, but newer Windows requires a cloud account – or how … etc etc.
The particular features mentioned here are used for specifying appearance, but not any deeper functionality. Hopefully, they apply primarily to the default theme – in which case some of the alternate themes as discussed at Colors and themes could make the site usable on “unsupported” browsers for a while longer.
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If a theme can avoid use of these thngs, that’s a plus, a way to keep using it.
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I looked a little into that just now – results are that I should maybe look a little more before I come across a theme to recommend (that can be relied upon to avoid those particular features.)
But I don’t think it would prevent you from logging in or anything – some colors may look wrong, some block of content may end up in the wrong place, plus that warning banner thingy.
So, it might be cause for some annoyances – but there’s a chance it might not end up looking too broken for you, even with the unsupported stuff. And then, there’s things like user styles (as browser extension on your end) that might be able to fix that for you, too.
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Yeah, we’ll see what happens.
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Bogus!!! That means my perfectly usable Air 2s cant access this web site? Been nice knowing you.