Yep, my father in law got locked out of his bank because of this. He has a Chromebook so he couldn't upgrade anymore, he thought he had to change his computer but fortunately Linux will never be obsolete so I just migrated him to freedom.

It's been like that for years if not decades though.

I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can't go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit's complicated.)

That being said I'm sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.

Older browsers don't support features that the pages are coded with. This could be security or just layout issues. It's difficult to support older browsers, or just the volume of browsers x versions. So it's reasonable to limit the test space. And it's usually easy for users to upgrade.

I built a webapp for work, and when a new PR firm / subcontractor entered the picture, they complained that it didn't work. I spent hours pulling my hair out until I figured out that they were using a seven year old version of Safari. Apparently, their laptops stopped receiving system updates from apple, and you can't upgrade safari alone. As someone who has never used an Apple computer, this blew my mind.

This follows many browser makers ending updates 4 older operating systems, leaving legacy devices unable to use web services without an OS upgrade.

Or, without switching browser which is the far easier approach. Firefox tends to keep updating for the longest.

It's mostly age verification services. Some Lithuanian service blocked me this way when I tried to sign up for a Wise account.

I have an old iPad Mini that is long outside the support deadline for Apple. It’s using AltStore instead now, but when I tried to install a patched version of Spotify, the app and even the web app, completely blocked both the OS version and the WebKit version. I can’t even use the web version of Apple Music on it. The amount of artificial locks these companies use is annoying as fuck.

How is this related to privacy, as you posted it in the privacy community?

This is not new. I had to get rid of my last switch because it didn't have a modern ssl protocol and I couldn't log in anymore. All of the internet browsers i have tried just threw errors.

No more Netscape Navigator for me I guess. 🥲

The method by which they check if your browser is "out-of-date" is not always/usually a simple version check. They check for browser features such as JS, WebGL, WASM, etc.

Probably part of the plan to to take all the hardware for data centers, make it more expensive to buy, and force everyone to rent services from their servers rather than own a computer.

I don't think it's entirely nefarious. I work as a web developer and new browser versions bring new features. I'd like to use those new features at some point without worrying about having to support super old browsers. An example would be the introduction of the OKLCH color system. That system is so much nicer than rgb as it allows calculating very accessible colors, but the whole system was only invented around 2020 and widely supported since 2023, so now's about the time that devs are starting to use it without feeling too bad about older browsers.
Or Javascript's new Object.groupBy function!! It's so neat! But it was only widely adapted in 2024 so I'm not using it in production yet.

I would more so think it's a privacy issue to use older browsers. At least compared with the modern privacy-focused ones.