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by slightlyoff 15 days ago
Article's author here. Arguments about "older browsers" are specious, particularly on iOS where Apple couples the browser engine to the OS, and forces all browsers to use Apple's binary.

If there is a legacy browser problem today, it is entirely within Cupertino's gift to address. Everyone else already moved to out-of-band, decoupled autoupdates. Even ChromeOS is dramatically more up-to-date fleet-wide.
1 comments
tgv 15 days ago
There are quite a lot of people out there with older browsers. You probably never meet them. I work for a company that gets processes 700k well distributed surveys per year, and there's always a bunch of old Chrome versions. Probably because it's "SamsungBrowser". That doesn't upgrade so easily. There are also people using third party browsers for points: you do a task, you get points. It's totally unclear when those get updated. Last month, there is an entry for Chrome 103 running on some old version of CrOS. I also see the occasional PlayStation browser, and other uncommon devices. And then we're talking Western Europe. The situation in e.g. Slovenia and Chile, where we also occasionally collect data, is different, probably a money issue.

And I wish you wouldn't update Edge so aggressively. Only last month, it turned out that Edge on Android refuses to play a video if it's under 5 seconds.

BTW, Apple does update the browser on older OS versions.

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slightlyoff 15 days ago
I'm well aware of the data on residual browsers; we have better metrics on the browser side than most public data sets. I also track the high/mid/low device mix, and we see that users on low-spec machines are generally less up-to-date:

https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...

This makes intuitive sense because those users are more likely to be out of disk space or bandwidth limited by geography or metering.

Regardless, while this issue is pronounced in the Android and Windows ecosystems, it's in a dramatically better place than it was in, e.g., the late Naughts when we had to build exotic solutions like Chrome Frame to address stagnation and fragmentation. So I'm not ignoring the issue, but again, to the extent we're discussing platforms that Apple has influence over, the ball is squarely in Cupertino's court. Every iPhone running an unsupported OS could be getting an updated browser, but Apple chooses not to make one or allow anyone else to plug the gap.

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