Disclaimer: All text below is my private opinion provided without any intention to lower the importance of latest browsers support.
Nevertheless... I think that while private end-users may behave as they like and they are free to leave their computers open to uncontrolled volatile software updates, updates for computers that are used for testing purposes must be controlled and performed in a scheduled planned manner.
Obviously, every company may have their own policy for this, but my primary reasons are like that:
-- Test engineers must know what environment they are working on. If I need to check something on Chrome 112 and it suddenly becomes unavailable this will be a huge problem for me;
-- I am not sure that all users may and can accept the concept of 'our web application is guaranteed to work on the latest version of the browser only'. If your company cannot afford to follow this concept, then you must have test environments with not latest version of the browser;
-- Test environments must be updated incrementally in a controlled manner to ensure that tests and everything else still works. If we update all our test environments at once, we may find ourselves in a situation when our tests are just blocked. What is better: to be able to let management know how tested application behaves with the previous version of the browser or be not able to say anything?
-- As an end-user I think that all these 'security-related' efforts became mostly marketing cover to force end-users to agree to update and to free browser provider from the obligation to support previous versions of the browser. (Microsoft, whatever is been said in its address was famous for its support of old applications in newest versions of Windows.) Two sub-notes: a) if security problem was revealed in the current version of the browser, is it really required to update the whole browser to the new version? Isn't a patch for some module is enough? And b) if security problems are revealed that often, I, as an end-user, may start thinking that browser provider just does not bother with proper design, implementation, validation and testing and just provides something that is 'good enough'. And finally, as an end-user, personally I use browser to read information and thus I am almost not interested in all this fancy stuff provided with the new version of the browser. And no, as an end-user I do not care about enhancements introduced for developers. Such stuff well can be made to be separate from the browser itself and be installed on demand only when/if needed.
Uf-f-f... 🙂
