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by nolist_policy 978 days ago
Web browsers are remarkably backwards compatible. 20 year old websites continue to work fine.

The things you linked are only advised against for new code:

> These features are likely stable because removing them will cause backward compatibility issues and break legacy websites. (JavaScript has the design goal of "don't break the web".) Still, they are not cross-platform portable and may not be supported by all analysis tools, so you are advised to not use them [...]

2 comments

They are also typically browser-specific extensions that were never cross-platform in the first place, features added based on proposals that were not in the end accepted (such as the Object.observe/unobserve API), or features from the Old Times™ before the specs were fully defined (and therefore typically also not cross-platform).

You've also got a bunch of deprecations for things that were in the spec, will almost certainly be supported forever, but are now seen as bad API design for one reason or another - usually because they don't handle edge cases correctly for historical reasons, or the name doesn't reflect what the function actually does. Unless any of these features actively leads to a security issue, they're very unlikely to be removed.

20 year old browsers don’t work at all, though. You can’t browse any of the top 100 sites, and you won’t be able to download an old release of firefox with your old version of internet explorer, because SSL.