Re:Germany wants smartphone makers to offer 7 years of softw...
by m0dest on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @05:13PM
(#28450024)
Browser APIs are less stable than you might think. If you've ever had to develop web apps for smart TVs (Samsung, LG, Vizio, etc.), then you'll find that each model year is frozen on an old version of Chromium – some from 2016, some from 2017, some from 2018, etc. There are enough differences between them to make this painful. For example: multiple versions of the Media Source Extensions API, web components, CSS variables, ES6 modules, and web font loading patterns.
This is a non-problem nowadays. We have long left the times in which browsers received essential features every few weeks. Using a browser with a feature set from five years ago you can still use all the most-visited websites perfectly fine. At the worst you're unable to use small, non-essential features of some sites. Maybe some ads look less fancy ;-)
Your problem today as a browser user is security against zero-interaction exploits, not missing out on some obscure brand-new CSS features. Security updates are thus what you need first and foremost.