My experience is actually the opposite.

In the old days there was no expection when and if users would upgrade anything, so vendors had to take extra care to ensure compatibility or they would lose business. People in a single office could be running 6 different versions of Microsoft Office, and the same file had to be viewable and editable on all of them. A company could decide to upgrade to Office 2010 but stay on Windows XP, so the Office division had the finanical incentive to ensure that newer versions would work on an older OS.

Nowadays the standard is "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or the app won't work". Don't want to upgrade to Win 11? Want to use Firefox instead of Chrome? Don't want all the bells and whistles that come with the newest version of the software? Too bad.

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guhidalg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

More like "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or you will get hacked".

	▲	thewebguyd 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because security fixes don't get backported, when they could, and few are still doing separate security vs. feature updates. Even Windows is doing it now with CUs, bundling feature & vulnerability patches together, then deprecating the last version. You don't have a choice anymore, it's "accept the features or else"