“Your browser is no longer supported. Please upgrade your browser to a newer version.”
browser site:
“Unsupported OS version! Please upgrade your OS to support the most current versions of our browser!”
OS upgrade:
“Your hardware is not supported by this OS. Please upgrade your hardware and try again.”
Rinse, repeat, every year or two.
Oh, that includes phones, too, not just tablets and laptops/desktops. My 2yo phone doesn’t even connect to Amazon, and Amazon used to be one of the better-behaved commercial websites. Nowadays, you might as well try to connect using Midori…
The last three aren’t new, and should work fine back to Firefox 108.
The relative color thing is new, but it seems like a silly thing to block a browser for. Mostly because it’s aesthetic, not functional. But also… looking at Discourse’s themes, it’s hard to imagine why it would require advanced color features. There’s barely any color.
Fixed that for you.
Old hardware can usually become shiny and new again by getting rid of corporate bloatware and switching to a community-based OS. I hear good things about CachyOS lately, or Mint is always pretty solid, or there are a ton of others.
It makes me sad how quickly people’s phones become unusable and get replaced. In part because of battery abuse turning the non-replaceable battery into a spicy pillow, and in part due to the predatory and user-hostile nature of the phone software ecosystem.
Both can be improved quite a bit though. A few things can make a huge difference:
Keep the battery charge in the middle, never totally full or totally empty. The range varies, with “20% to 80%” being a common recommendation… but I usually go more by voltage instead of percent, and a range of 3.6V to 4.2V ends up being more like “5%” to “75%” on my phone.
Use a slow charger. It should take about 3 to 6 hours to do a partial charge up to ~75%.
Turn off wifi and cell data except when you’re actively using them, and enable “battery saver” pretty much all the time. This has several benefits: Reduced data leakage, reduced interruptions/notifications, reduced background processes doing god-knows-what, and dramatically longer battery life (both in terms of hours per charge and years of phone lifespan).
Uninstall, disable, block, or remove permissions from as much proprietary software as possible. Most of it is spyware / adware anyway, in addition to whatever it says it is supposed to do. Preferably, get rid of the Google app store and Google software stack entirely. This does wonders for privacy and battery life. Instead, try open-source apps from places like F-Droid.
Switch to a community-based OS if possible, like Graphene or Lineage. This isn’t always feasible, but it’s great when you have the option.
Completely block data access for most apps, and otherwise turn off as many permissions as possible.
My phone is about 4 years old. I wasn’t able to install a different OS on it because it’s a cheap model so nobody bothered adding support for it, but I did at least root it and disable a lot of the built-in corporate junk. The battery lasts about 1 to 2 weeks per partial charge, depending on how much I use it. Like, if I spend hours and hours each day using it, it’ll need to be charged in about a week… and when I ignore it, it’ll hit 2 weeks. My record is 3 weeks, but that was without really using it at all.
Anyway, this is pretty off-topic, but… it bothers me when corporations try to force people to keep buying and keep upgrading instead of building things to last and continuing to support old versions for a long time.
I’m using a 4 year old Google Pixel 4a that’s never worked right and Duck Duck Go to access this site and didn’t notice any changes, everything still works fine.
I tried that when all Hell broke loose with my old systems. Had zero working systems at one point, so getting a Linux distro didn’t work. Had an old Ubunto ceedee, didn’t have connectivity to the outside world from readonly/live/whatever mode and/or wouldn’t write to the drive to save anything (or I couldn’t find how to do so… dunno, been ages). Had stuff on the (failing) disk I needed to pull off first, so installing was a no-go until that happened.
Had old FF Portable, worked, but ancient version was rejected by those sites.
Etc., etc., etc. Point being all that has to be done when things are working and you have the leisure to arse around figuring out stuff.
Work machine (laptop), though, had to be Windoze. Vpn and especially 2fa were “proprietary”. Old version was openvpn-compatible, but not the new one they switched to, only windoze/macos versions existed; everyone else was SOL.
Ancient android tablet was similar: ancient browser didn’t work with anything anymore, and that was the last android version that was upgradeable for the hardware (like popcorn vs snickers, or whatever were the goofball names for the versions back then).
Universal problem with android tablets, apparently, that they slowly die a quiet death of things stopping working, and no (easy?) way to upgrade the os vs the hardware. No idea if they need to be degoggled, jailbroke, or what, as it never was an issue before I slammed into it with zero warning.
Catchy? Last I played with Arch was on a RPi, and it seemed to be completely stripped down, to the point I just stared at the desktop(??) and wondered what to do next… or at all.
Actually, I take care of the batteries, and I’m 100% convinced it’s OTA “tweaking” that changed the thresholds of what’s “low battery” to artificially “kill” the battery only in the numbers.
Was teethed on Nokia soapbar/candybar phones, and the beige-case with color screen one (forgot the model) worked beautifully forever, but in a very very short time seemed to be losing battery capacity.
Kfine, figured I had it forever and it (battery) was dying, so swapped in the battery from a brandy new same-model phone that was unused (Target used to have them on sale with included aircard, so I often got more than one to have as spares). That battery had the same sucky performance, right out of the box!
It’s like tweaking a flashlight’s innards to think that instead of 2.9V being low-voltage cutoff, to bump that to 3.3V and maybe later 3.6V, to “encourage” people to ditch the light for a newer model. Battery’s fine, same capacity as before, but the light thinks it’s running on vapors when it’s still got 50% SOC.
And the fact that it happened so suddenly vs gradually made me suspect.
I’ve only ever used cheap phones that came with airtime, or which I’d get free with a tank of gas, etc. Mostly “dumb” Nokiæ since the beginning, and then a Nuron running Symbian. Only lately have I had to get a Maven 2 then 3 with so much bloatware that even with nothing extra installed, they started bitching about running out of space. Oh, and flipphones with stripped-down android. I’m not about to start carrying a phone the size of a clipboard, no matter how fancy.
And most of the time either I have the phones just plain turned off, or “forget” 'til they eventually run out of charge. Yeah, I’m not A Phone Guy™.
Absolutely loved that Nuron, though. Phone was the least-used function, and loved the calendar, calculator, notes, mp3 player, etc., using it as more of a PDA than phone.
Actually, with me it seems to be more of a slow war with the browser, OS, and hardware, all tag-teaming me one at a time, as above.
An ancient tablet with pretty much just vlc or similar viewer for movies, I’ve keep airgapped from the intertubes since I got it, and it still works fine. Same like with my vista(!!) laptop, that I mainly only use with my flightsim, and was never ever connected to the net (and getting broken by stealth “updates”).
It’s only when you need to connect to the outside world that all these sites “need” the newest browsers/versions, and that “needs” the latest OSes because support for those browsers gets dropped, and in turn that “needs” the latest hardware for said OSes.
In isolation, old systems work fine pretty much forever.
I noticed a quirk. Typically when I go into the forum It would open with the latest tab selected. I would go to unread. Read a thread then click the topics heading in the left pane. It would return me to the unread tab. Now it always goes back to the latest selection. I have tried this on three different machine with the latest version of Chrome. I am getting the same results. Is there a way to make my last selection “stick” until I leave the forum (or until there are no more threads that fit the category)?
Interesting, I hadn’t noticed the previous behavior you described. Other Discourse forums seem to behave the same as BLF does currently, so it looks like it’s not specific to our configuration here. If I find out anything more I’ll post back here.
Thanks. I just noticed it over the last few days… as it adds an additional mouse click to get back to the unread category. I guess it is not a deal killer, but it is definitely a change in behavior from what I have been doing.
To be clear, what behavior is it that you hadn’t noticed. The current behavior or what I described as being used to in the past…i.e sticking to the currently selected category?
I just noticed something.
If I click on “Switch to new rich text editor”, the default reply box doesn’t fit on my screen.
(I’m using a 4K TV as a monitor.)
To “Quote whole post”, I need to click on the “Options” button first.
I don’t plan on using the new rich text editor, but that’s where the “Quote whole post” button used to be.
Also, the new rich text editor looks just like the standard Markdown editor.
Thanks for the reply. My habit has been for a long time to select “Unread” read a thread. Go to the topic at the top of the left pane. It would stay in In unread topics. I promise the behavior has changed. It now changes to Latest… I guess I was just curious as to whether this was due to the update?
OK thanks for that. At this point in the development cycle there don’t seem to be any advantages and several disadvantages with the new composer, so I just hid the button for now. If needed it can still be switched with Ctrl + M
Interesting. I tried it a couple days ago and it worked fine in my theme on BLF, but when I tried it on the upstream Discourse site, the new editor was halfway off the right edge of the window.
Now that you mention it breaks here on a 4K screen though, I did some testing… If I zoom the browser contents, the new editor works at some zoom levels but not others.
So I figure it’s something I’ll need to fix in CSS. The editor didn’t exist when I wrote the stylesheet, so it’s surprising it works at all.
The new editor is kind of nice. Sometimes I prefer one, sometimes I prefer the other.
I noticed the button was gone, and wasn’t sure how I’d fix it if I can’t access it any more, but then I saw the info about the hotkey. Thanks for leaving a way to get to it. That’ll allow me to mess around and try to fix it.
I find it useful to separate likes from replies, since likes don’t require any action. They can be cleared out quickly, leaving only notifications which are more likely to need follow-up.
“Topics” menu:
Unread: /unread?order=activity
Latest: /latest?order=activity&state=
Hot: /top
Watching: /latest?order=activity&state=watching
Tracking: /latest?order=activity&state=tracking
Read: /u/MyUser/activity/read
Replied To: /search?expanded=false&q=in%3Aposted%20order%3Alatest
Polls: /tag/poll
Users: /u
I also used some css to remove the default sidebar content so it’ll show only my custom menus. And some extra bits to make the sidebar smaller and more compact, and to delete buttons I never use in the post editor.
/* remove default sidebar content */
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="categories"],
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="community"],
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="messages"],
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="my-threads"],
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="tags"],
.sidebar-section[data-section-name="blf-info"],
foo {
display: none !important;
}
/* smaller, more compact sidebar */
.sidebar-wrapper .sidebar-sections {
padding: 0.5em 0;
}
.sidebar-row {
height: unset;
padding: .1rem 0.66rem;
}
.sidebar-section-wrapper .sidebar-section-content {
padding-bottom: 0.5em;
}
:root {
--d-sidebar-width: 9em;
}
/* remove extra buttons in editor */
/* (these take, like, one or two keypresses ... no point having a mouse button for it) */
button.bold,
button.italic,
button.strikethrough_button,
button.blockquote,
button.code,
button.bullet,
button.list,
foo {
display: none;
}
OK that will work. I think I will need to do it for each machine that I use. @ToyKeeper I will study what you wrote some more. I am not totally sure how I get to the “My Stuff” that you talk about. Also I will need to figure out how to apply the script. Because getting rid of the sidebar would be nice.
