Asterisk and FreePBX forums no longer support Firefox on Debian oldstable

For information. As of this afternoon, the Asterisk community forum refuses to let me log in using my preferred browser, Firefox, fully patched, but standard repository package, on Debian 10 (oldstable). I rather expect the FreePBX one to go the same way, very soon. It may take me a few days to sort out a compatible configuration.

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Why? 

Hmm, I am using Firefox 102.0.1 on a Ubuntu 22.04 box and everything is fine with both fora.

Is it Discourse that needs to be updated?

From the perspective of the Asterisk forum, it is a hosted instance from Discourse themselves and they automatically keep it up to date and working. The FreePBX forum is hosted by us and managed by us, so it’s not as aggressive from an update perspective. This doesn’t really change things in the end but just elaborating on it a bit.

Why am I using oldstable, or why has discourse changed.

For the former, I’m retired and using a home system, so don’t have an IT department to look after the hit of checking and installing leading edge versions, when the older version is still supported. I suspect that Chrome might work, as it looks like Debian simply pass through the latest versions, rather than backporting security fixes, and using extended support releases (78.14.Oesr). I’ll probably move to current stable soon, but I’ll have to allocate time, because I won’t have had anyone from IT to test install on a disposable system.

Probably, for the latter, the general problem of software fashion, that means every latest gimmick has to be used, rather than designing for the oldest browser likely to be significantly used. Built in obsolescence.

Sorry, guess I should have been more verbose. None of the above. I meant it as a technical question. What’s failing? TLS negotiation, authentication, javascript loading, etc.?

None of the above. Either the server side scripting, or the client side scripting, is doing a user agent check and discriminating against my version.

Unfortunately, your browser is too old to work on this site. Please upgrade your browser to view rich content, log in and reply.

Followed by a non-rich text, read-only, version of the page.

I use a ff browser plugin called User Agent switcher which allows me to impersonate a phone for troubleshooting purposes. You might be able to do something similar.

It didn’t take long to follow suit. Fortunately Chrome is still acceptable. Pasting was broken earlier, so now that it is working better, this is what the user sees.

Just to clarify here, we are all aware that Debian 10 isn’t the problem right? The real issue here is that this and the Asterisk forum don’t support old versions of browsers. I mean Debian 10 has been oldstable since August 2021, it just now having issues with FF and websites means websites have decided that these old versions now fall into the “too old for us” list.

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