[throwaway58670]

Some old-enough browsers don't support SSL. At all.

Also, something I often see non-technical people fall victim to is that if your clock is off, the entirety of the secure web is inaccessible to you. Why should a blog (as opposed to say online banking) break for this reason?

[donatj]

Even older browsers that support SSL often lack up-to-date root certificates, which prevents them from establishing trust with modern SSL/TLS certificates.

[robinsonb5]

Fairly recently I attempted to get an (FPGA-emulated) Amiga, a G4 Power Macintosh running System 9.2, and a Win2000sp4 Virtual Machine online (just for very select downloads of trusted applications, not for actual browsing). It came as a huge surprise to find that the Win2K VM was the biggest problem of the three.

[Gud]

How old are these browsers and why should I let them online? Must be decades old.

[niutech]

Android versions prior to 4.4 support only TLS 1.0 which is deprecated and many old devices aren't upgradable. The same for Mobile IE 10.

IE 10 in Windows Server 2008 doesn't support TLS 1.1+ by default.

[robinsonb5]

Yup, my last phone upgrade was prompted by this.

But the old phone is significantly better at making actual phone calls than the new one.

[verzali]

Why is it your job to police the browsers people use?

[wpm]

> Must be decades old.

So? If they still power on and are capable of talking HTTP over a network, and you don't require the transfer of data that needs to be secured, why shouldn't you "let" them online?

[fragmede]

I don't know about you, but I'd rather my ancient laptop not end up as part of a botnet simply because I visited the wrong website with it.

[Gud]

Why you shouldn’t use old, unpatched software on an open network that doesn’t support modern protocols?

Beats me.

[layer8]

Usually browsers on hobbyist legacy operating systems, to which modern browsers haven’t or can’t be ported, not to mention keeping root certificates up to date. Or even if they do support SSL, then only older algorithms and older versions of the protocol. It’s nice to still be able to browse at least part of the web with those.

[olau]

The problem is usually SSL support, the problem is that older SSL and TLS versions are being disabled.

I actually have an example myself - an iPad 3. Apple didn't allow anyone else than themselves to provide a web browser engine, and at some point they deliberately stopped updates. This site used to work, until some months ago. I currently use it for e-books, if that wasn't the case I think it by now it would essentially be software bricked.

I acknowledge that owning older Apple hardware is dumb. I didn't pay for it, though.