Dev here, there are actual reasons to do this beyond control. It's a small percentage of the overall population of users who require old browsers. Financially not worth the dev time, and most especially maintenance time for fallback behaviors. Over time there are upgrades and new features added to the browser and to the rendering engines that make our lives much easier or add much desired functionality for users. Users on old browsers may not have these and bringing that functionality is either impossible or cost far exceeds that which is pulled in from the the few.

User agent based blocking is stupid, but also, you should really, really keep your browser up to date.

They've been doing this for decades, it's just that only recently we had a big reason to keep our browsers out of date.

Why are you reposting someone else's post in the same community an hour later?

Older browsers lacking certain APIs / features.

E.g. let’s say you want your app to use WebUSB to interface directly with a USB device. Oh wait, can’t use that, Firefox and Safari don’t support it yet.

Developing web apps can be a pain when you’ve got numerous browsers with different web standards implemented to varying, inconsistent degrees. Compound that with supporting older browsers and you’ve got a web apps not able to leverage modern features and suck using lowest common denominators.

Honestly, browsers are the most dangerous membrane through which we let untrusted code permeate. One really shouldn’t be running old versions of browsers with unpatched vulnerabilities residing in them. I don’t see the problem in any web service ending support for browsers that are >6months out of date.

This has been happening for eternity. I remember distinctly the day we deprecated IE6, 7, and 8 from the retail website I maintained. We literally went out for happy hour that night to celebrate on the management dime.

It's not about security necessarily, though it can be. The main issue is using frameworks and web servers that support old versions of browsers (depending on how old we're talking) means you need compatibility layers which sometimes means multiple versions of the same website needs to be maintained, and can prevent you from upgrading to the latest versions that no longer support those old browsers.

Sometimes that means you don't get a feature you want or need. Sometimes that means you get delayed security fixes. That, and testing for backwards compatibility is awful.

Think about it this way- old browsers run old versions of JavaScript, CSS, in extreme cases, old versions of HTML. Some of those have backwards combatibility for a few major releases, some don't. Supporting multiple of those for a complex website is a huge undertaking.

Why would a website want to have planned obsolescence of your browser?

Really curious what you think it could be?

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking.

Just get an extension that fakes your agent string.

"User agent". Firefox has an extension that can spoof different browsers/OSs with just a tap. It's actually really useful for sites that don't work correctly, or you want to bypass annoying restrictions.

Yeah, that's the one

your browser's fingerprint (or whatever it's called).

User Agent?

If some crappy website gives me this, then I'm never visiting them again. Good riddance.

Also, it's probably super easy to trick the sites given how you can change your browser's fingerprint (or whatever it's called).

I have no real idea about iOS, that's why I ask.
Why would browser bring it's own keyboard?
Isn't that handled by the default keyboard app over the whole system?

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You're right. I'm free to understand reality, and you're free to assume your insanity is anything related to it.

Have you read press releases of the past? They always repeat the few new things to make them sound more substantial than they are...

Again, the LLMs were TRAINED ON SOMETHING to write like that.

These patterns didn't emerge the second someone used an LLM to generate something... They've been around for literally decades.

There are several indicators it's not as well.

There is a reason LLMs talk like that: They were trained to! Where do you think that training data came from? Professional writing and PR pieces, like this.

Their energy estimates are way off. 240wh/4gb download is too high by 100x.

It's not clear that there is a privacy argument. That address bar content is sent to google was always the case.

There is a bloatware argument especially if the only added functionality is form-fill which was done fairly satisfactorily without the 4gb download.

OTOH, gemini nano is now effectively open weight model if it, and it is likely a hack will permit user access to the bloat tax.

That would certainly be a more apt concern, but the article is specifically talking about the network bandwidth:

The article is, (in my opinion) unfairly and intentionally, confusing the non-consensual download energy use with the optional inference energy use.

The concern isn't about the download, it's about the power it uses during local inferencing.