[omgtehlion]

> so it’s hard to make the case for keeping it.

How about “not breaking stuff” which can not be upgraded? Like old sites/services without active maintainers but still useful. Or hardware appliances that still work, but will not get firmware update ever. Let alone rss feeds, brought up multiple times in the linked thread.

Looks like builtin polyfill (similar to pdfjs in FF) would do. But google seems to be reluctant doing it.

[conductr]

When’s a reasonable time to pull the plug on out of fashion legacy stuff? Things can’t always remain backwards compatible forever. I think the places this is still in use can build contingencies where required

[comex]

Why can’t things remain backwards compatible forever? In the 35 years that the Web has existed, browsers have come pretty damn close to meeting that standard. The one huge exception is the removal of plugin support around 2015, and the concomitant death of Flash and Java applets. There were also some major browser-specific APIs that got killed off, like ActiveX and NaCl. But when it comes to standardized, browser-native functionality… very little has ever been removed. I would prefer it if I could say the same thing in another 35 years.

[3036e4]

Things can remain backwards compatible forever. That is what any good standard does. Web standards and much else in software is sadly a complete mess where too few care about all the downsides of instability.

I am a bit worried because for many years I used plugins like SinglePage to save web pages as HTML. That is not exactly future-safe since every relase of Chromium or Firefox has a list of things that were deprecated (and a list of things that changed, that might or might not break rendering of old pages). Old saved pages will eventually begin to degrade and some might eventually be unreadable without having to mess with virtual machines to run old browsers.

[account42]

If you want to build a stable platform: never.

[pjmlp]

Lets remind ourselves that thanks to Google we also did not got WebGL 2.0 Compute, it was too much for Chrome team to spend their resources between WebGL 2.0 Compute and WebGPU.

How great that five years later WebGPU is something we can rely on in portable way. /s