>Your issue however also ties in to what the article said about how Apple does not auto update Safari. You're tied to Safari 12 partially because the upgrade flow is a huge disruptive process as you have to update your entire OS to a new major revision.

Sorry, but to be clear, my lack of update is just that -- lack of ambition to do so. I don't really have a compelling reason to update MacOS or Safari.

>Who can say why those sites are breaking for your version of Safari. Web devs do love to just use the "latest and greatest" APIs just for fun, but it could also be that their changes have improved the experience for the rest of users on modern browsers, and that for them outweighs the loss of users still of Safari 12.

This is kind of my point though -- WebDev is kind of unique as I see it as there are far more opaque changes than with other software disciplines. Changelists are pretty common for every other software discipline, but I'm not sure I can recall too many websites ever mentioning backend changes they make.

WebDev changes and fast, and a general feeling is that "outdated" in WebDev appears far faster than anything else (e.g., a friend uses my old 2012 MacBook Air -- it works perfectly still, runs modern Editing and Authoring software (adobe suite), plays videos, works on most websites just fine. Some sites like imgur just shit the bed on it except for Chrome because of browser compatibility) For a situation like this, when absolutely everything else runs fine except for a single website on browsers, it feels hard to blame OS Vendors when it's only the site that is having issues being displayed.

>I am saying that the lack of modern features by Safari and Firefox _is_ a detriment to users and web devs,

I'm not sure I'm convinced for the reason above, but it's not really possible for an end user to comment because of:

- Lack of transparency on why the changes were done in the first place

- LifeCycle for features in WebDev are much different than other software life cycles

- Old OSes and hardware can run comparatively contemporary software (i.e., new and modern) without issue, it's only WebDev that bumps into this

- In many cases, the old stack worked "fine" for users regardless of browser

This is where the impression that it's just feature chasing comes from. You can say Safari is a detriment to me, but it has the best battery life (expected), is fastest on MacOS (also expected), has a UI I really like and prefer (likely expected as it's made to look like the rest of MacOS.

The new feature that web developers want to use from Chrome isn't just weighed against my experience on your site; it's weighed against the overall browser performance the computer performance, and the browser experience with the computer.

I might visit a single site for 10-30 minutes on a given day. I'm using the web browser almost constantly for many many many sites. When one site tries to tell me my browser is insufficient/outdated and it's the only one that is causing issues, I don't feel particularly persuaded by this. It's not about raw numbers; Hacker News performs the same way for me today as it did the day I joined, and while I'm sure they've done gobs of optimizations for the amount of traffic and users they handle, from my point of view as a user on many browsers, the experience is the same.