I’m Not Supporting Legacy Browsers, and You Can’t Make Me

Who Are These Icons Even For?

As a primarily backend engineer, I don’t claim to fully understand User Experience. I like logic, math and system design, and trying to make a seamless user interface gives me a little bit of anxiety. Maybe I’m not the best at making UIs good, but I know when it looks bad.

So, naturally, I spent way too long crafting a logo I actually like.

Notice the Subtle off-white coloring.

The tasteful thickness of it.

But once I dropped the SVG file into my app, I realized that wasn’t enough. Only the most modern browsers support it.

There was a laundry-list of other icons necessary for cross-browser compatibility.

Including but not limited too:

• An .ico file for older browsers
• PNGs for mobile devices
• Safari pinned tab icons: a bizarre format seemingly invented to make your logo look worse

All I wanted was a favicon. Now I need an art department.

Apparently I’m expected to generate an entire folder of pixel art just to satisfy outdated user agents. Neat.

But the icon situation is only the tip of the backward-compatibility iceberg.

TODO REMOVE? But the logo is just the tip of the iceberg: to make this site professional, we need cross-platform compatibility. Every user should have a consistent experience regardless of platform.

But the thing is, I have no reason to make it professional. For a personal site, there’s no reason to support legacy browsers. Or niche devices. If my website and assets render properly on a computer, Android, or iPhone made within the last ten years, then that’s good enough for me.

Shims, Polyfills, and the Path of Madness

If I were serious about legacy support, I wouldn’t stop at icons. I’d also need:

• CSS fallbacks for browsers that don’t support :has() or aspect-ratio

• JavaScript shims and polyfills for features like fetch, Promise, or ES Modules

• HTML hacks for ancient rendering quirks

And much, much more.

For what? A personal blog? A static site with some code samples and tech rants?

No, thank you.

My Philsophy: Let Them Cope

I don’t care about backwards-compatibility.

I’m not putting in the extra effort to support legacy browsers or devices. Especially not Safari.

Why?

Because:

• Modern users use modern browsers
• It requires bespoke logic with depreciating returns
• I don’t want to deploy something I cannot directly test
• I really don’t care if my site renders properly on a 20 year old Department-of-Agriculture-issued laptop

If your browser can’t handle .svg, .ico, or a .png, then I’m sorry. Maybe you’re not my audience. Or maybe you’re browsing my site from a locked-down work machine.

In which case, get back to work.

The Real Users Don’t Care

No one—no actual human—has ever said:

“I was going to bookmark your site, but your pinned Safari icon wasn’t properly masked.”

And the people who do say that?
They’re Apple devotees. They drink Soylent. They paid full price for the Apple Vision Pro.

They’re my friends—but I’m not making their stupid little Safari pin icon.

What I Do Support

Here’s what my site supports:

• All the major modern browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera)
• Android and iOS browsers.
• Coherent social previews (og:image) for posting hot takes on Twitter.

That’s it. That covers 99% of the people who will ever land on my site.

The rest? Sorry.

Backwards Compatibility as a DSM Entry

Look, I get it. Despite the trash talk, backward-compatibility is extremely important—in the right context.

If you’re building applications for government, enterprise, or regulated industries, then compatibility is a requirement. And they have internal processes which take forever to approve basic software. Their security teams won’t approve a browser update unless Mercury is in retrograde.

And if you’re creating accessible apps for users with vision or motor impairments, you absolutely need to obsess about things like contrast ratios, screen readers, and keyboard navigation.

The product must cater to its intended audience.

But this? This isn’t that.

This is a personal site.

This is a one-man site with an RSS feed nobody uses.

If your hobby is crafting a perfectly tuned icon manifest that works on Internet Explorer 6: then I salute you. You are doing the God’s work. But I won’t be joining you.

I’d rather spend my time on actual functionality, performance, and writing low-effort content that nobody will read.

Final Thoughts

If your browser renders my favicon as the default globe icon, that’s fine by me.

Some things are meant to be left behind.

P.S. If you do pin my site in Safari, I genuinely hope the icon looks terrible.