Thanks @scztt ! - on Safari I get the following: Unfortunately, your browser is unsupported. Please switch to a supported browser to view rich content, log in and reply.
How does what you’re seeing correspond to this post about Safari support? (E.g. does this look like your OS/version?)
I’m on desktop - MacOS 11.6 - pretty recent machine!
Huh, maybe it’s the Safari version? Checking the release dates, if your never upgraded Safari since you first installed MacOS 11.6, then you would have Safari 14, which is Sept. 2020 - this definitely seems new enough. But I guess there could be ways you’re on an older safari? Is it just the chat page that doesn’t work?
Yeah, it seems like the 14 series is not supported? Discourse have a policy of supporting only recent browser versions - though the last release was I think 1.5 ish years ago, Safari 14 is two major versions back and definitely not supported by Apple anymore. I now see complaints about this on other Discourse-backed forums - I’ll keep an eye on the issue.
I imagine this MIGHT be an issue coming up specifically with Safari because Chrome and Firefox tend to push a continuous stream of background updates so - if you watch browser version usage stats - there’s a vanishingly small number of people on old versions of these browsers. But IIRC Apple pushes Safari updates as part of their OS updates, so there may be more people sitting a few versions back.
I guess I can see a few possible resolutions for this:
- The Discourse dev team gets enough complaints about this, and broaden their browser support to encompass slightly old Safari versions - problem solved.
- We roll the Discourse back to the 2.x series. I imagine this would really only be temporary, since I imagine this would put us behind on security / support updates, so in a way the clock would be ticking. I’m not sure what this would look like: how long would we sit on 2.x, what would be the criteria for us jumping to 3 in the future?
- We accept that older browser versions have to use the “static” page version of the site, and a hopefully small number of people will need to upgrade to use the dynamic version of the site.
- We make a patch / plugin for Discourse that hacks around the browser version detection, so older Safari users still get SOME experience of the dynamic site, albeit probably with some things not working correctly. I’m just not sure if this is possible, and how bad it would be for old browsers? And, of course, someone with a bit of web expertise would need to work this out.
In the mean time, you could check to see what Safari update options you have for your machine? Please report back, it seems like you’re in the exact un-sweet-spot where a reasonable not-that-out-of-date browser version doesn’t work - it would be helpful to know if this is an easily fixable problem or something that will leave more people out in the cold.
Happily was able to upgrade to Safari 16 and all is well here…
I do expect that the number of people forced to use the static site will be small - I purposely uncheck auto-update on system preferences. so as not break things but I expect most users don’t…
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