Considering all the discussions about JavaScript and sites with primarily text requiring it, this looks like the more things change, the more they remain the same :-P. Also see Wirth's Plea for Lean Software[0] from 1995 for another "timeless" issue.

I did find this bit interesting too...

> Apart from this practical reason, there's a principal one: The first time I invoked Netscape, it said that it is obsolete and refuses to work. I don't use software that thinks it knows better than I when I should stop using it.

...considering the modern trend for autoupdating software. The author (after this paragraph) also considers availability, but another issue is if the software is something one would like to use even if it is available - for instance, personally i never liked using a version of Paint Shop Pro after version 7 since i found all of them a degradation. I can use PSP7 just fine though (even on Linux via Wine) - imagine if the software decided by itself that it is too old to run or to replace itself with a new version against my wishes (this is something a lot of software does nowadays).

From a user's perspective this also has implications on preserving backwards compatibility for foundational functionality programs rely on.

[0] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf

Firefox on Ubuntu (which I'm not using anymore for these and other reasons) and presumably on other OSs does exactly that: refuse to open new tabs/sites once every two weeks or so, telling me "one more thing we need to do" ie self-update. So you're loosing all your browsing context, though FF does a better job restoring it after restart than it used to, but still that's user-hostile and self-important as fuck. And there's also a "principal" reason why I can't stand this: that the Web is now 30 years old, past its peak, so if browsers still need to update bi-weekly for new features and experiments, this in combination with lack of browser diversity proves without any shade of doubt there's something very wrong with the incentives for browser development, the Google/Mozilla browser cartel, and the evolution of "web standards".

Go to Firefox settings and disable auto-update? `about:config` > `app.update.auto: false`

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates

https://linuxreviews.org/HOWTO_Make_Mozilla_Firefox_Stop_Nag...