GitHub moved to a JavaScript rendering mode almost as soon as Microsoft bought it. Previously, I had been able to browse it with JavaScript disabled on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13. So even if I enable JavaScript, I can no longer browse GitHub, because they didn't bother to make their build compatible with browser versions as old as mine.
It's hard to know which member of the duopoly is more guilty for breaking GitHub for me, but I find that blaming both often guarantees success.
I could like, buy a new computer and stuff. But you know, the whole Turing complete thing feels like a lie in the age of planned obsolescence. So web standards are too.
Firefox 115 is the last version that runs on 10.12, 10.13, and 10.14 (also Windows 7 and 8). At this point 115 is 2 years old and GitHub is only tested on bleeding edge browsers, apparently.
So GitHub is usable but there are a number of UI layout issues and searching within a file is sometimes a mess (eg, highlighting the wrong text, rendering text incorrectly, etc. maybe that's true for all browsers. you're better off viewing a file as text in raw mode)
Does that change anything compared to running an old version of Safari that's also extremely slow because of a bug to boot? Modern websites are broken on abandoned browsers anyway, but if you install a less-abandoned browser you'll have a better experience on average.
Firefox doesn't work on Windows 7 anymore but installing Firefox is still a hell of a lot better than sticking to IE.
Planned obsolescence is some of it, some of it is abstractions making it easier for more people to make software (at the cost of using significantly more compute) and Moore’s law being able to support those abstraction layers. Just imagine if every piece of software had to be written in C, the world would look a whole lot different.
I also think we’ve gone a bit too far into abstraction land, but hey, that’s where we are and it’s unlikely we are going back.
Turing completeness is almost an unrelated concept in all of this if you ask me, and if anything it’s because of completeness that has driven higher and higher memory and compute requirements.
> on my 2011 Mac Mini which Apple stopped allowing upgrades on past macOS 10.13
I know some people feel like Apple is aggressive in this respect, but that's an 8 year old version of a browser. That's like taking off all of the locks on your house, leaving the doors and windows open all while expecting your house to never have uninvited guests.
But Apple is also the one locking Safari to the OS, IE style. Having to buy a new machine to get the latest and secure version of a browser is a pretty heavy requirement.
or use a supported OS (linux, or hilariously probably Windows), or install a still-suppored browser (I'd guess Firefox likely still runs latest on there).
I'd put it on the end user for not updating software on 15 y/o hardware and still expecting the outside world to interact cleanly.
It's a matter of expectations, many laptops that old still work decently enough with a refreshed battery. Funnily enough win10 was released 15 ago, and one can still get support for it for at least another 3 years until 2028, even on the customer license.
Will modern versions of those other browsers still work on an 8 year old OS, or has it been updated where it is no longer compatible? So much effort has been put into hardware rendering, and the mechanisms for the browser to interact with that hardware has changed within those OS versions. Forcing the user to download an older compatible version of the browser to work with the older OS is also tossing away potential security fixes.
> That's like taking off all of the locks on your house, leaving the doors and windows open all while expecting your house to never have uninvited guests.
Depending on where you live (or what websites you visit) it's not unreasonable.
It's hard to know which member of the duopoly is more guilty for breaking GitHub for me, but I find that blaming both often guarantees success.
I could like, buy a new computer and stuff. But you know, the whole Turing complete thing feels like a lie in the age of planned obsolescence. So web standards are too.