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Comment by abanana | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame such an arrogant attitude exists, to call everyone who can't afford to replace their iPhone with a newer model "stupid". And developers really should know better than to fall for the marketing nonsense that anything more than 5 minutes old is "insecure".

> expecting developers to waste time working around all the bugs in those old browsers is just insane

What bugs? The ancestor posts are talking about frameworks immediately using features that were just added to browsers - i.e. more recently than those older versions. Nothing at all to do with bugs. Can you help us to see what you've misunderstood here? Perhaps not dismissing users as "stupid", developers as "insane", and admins (?) as "lazy", would be a good starting point.

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> can't afford ... iPhone

Seems to be a bad decision from the beginning.

> And developers really should know better than to fall for the marketing nonsense that anything more than 5 minutes old is "insecure".

Where have you been the last decades? Pick an arbitrary browser and go through their CVE list, e.g.: https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=safari&vendor=apple

> What bugs?

I guess at that point I have to assume you have no idea about front-end development. Otherwise you would know what a pain in the ass old browsers with their inconsistencies are (e.g. remember the struggle with the early flexbox implementations?).

> Seems to be a bad decision from the beginning

I don't disagree! But at the same time, part of our job as web developers involves acknowledging the reality of what our users actually do.

What do early flexbox implementations (something like 12-15 years ago?) have to do with anything? We're not talking about browsers as old as that! They weren't even bugs, they were early implementations of early versions of the standard, so who exactly is the one with no idea here? That level of browser inconsistencies is long gone.

Those of us with years of experience of building user-centric front-ends are not the ones who jump to use new browser features too quickly.

I won't be continuing this conversation, due to the general arrogance and condescension displayed in your posts - following "stupid", "insane" and "lazy" with "bad decision", "where have you been" and "you have no idea".

> What do early flexbox implementations (something like 12-15 years ago?)

It shows that a) new technologies may add value and also that browsers constantly fix bugs due to complex or underspecified standards. It was just an example, go through the issues lists and you find a lot more.

> not the ones who jump to use new browser features too quickly

That's reasonable but there is a point where support just should be dropped. Don't support IE 5 for ages just because someone is too scared to update. Let them fix their technical debt. Encouraging people to access the internet with insecure software is not acceptable. Btw. that was the argument you completely ignored in your reply.

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