The GOG mainpage is broken using Palemoon (my favorite browser) and IE11 not showing the "News" at the bottom and missing other parts of the page aswell for a while. On Edge it shows everything. Google Chrome is an absolutely no-go for me and so I have to ask: why did you change that, GOG? It shouldn't be that hard to design a page with HTML5 which also works with an Firefox fork like Palemoon ...

GOG dropped support of IE, all forks as well as non-newest versions of the popular browers. They said they don't want to bother with IE and such because the amount of users makes it not worth it.

I would agree with IE, but for the rest: no support for standard HTML5 conform browsers means no purchases from me anymore.

Chrome: violates my privacy and is starting to fight adblockers. (google for it, hahaha)
Firefox: violates the interests of a vast amount of their userbase on a regular base, does everything to push people to switch to other browsers.
IE: yeah, is dead, should stay dead.
Edge: no one trusts microsoft anymore and they switch to the chrome renderer anyway in the near future.

And GOG is eager to loose their privacy orientated customers. I'm really interested in the TECHNICAL explanation why the site isn't HTML5 conform anymore ... :]
Yeah, GOG ... "one world, one price" was never forgotten by me also. :P

I mean, they were called out on the completely broken mess back in the beginning of October when they changed it but they didn't even bother to reply, until mid-December or something, over two months later (shows you how much they care about their community). And at that point they only stated what I mentioned above including some other points of interest, such as GOG mixes etc. I have the same problem as you and had to change my bookmark because the main page is unusable. Would have already jumped ship but sadly enough, there is no proper GOG alternative around, yet.

Yes, but on the other hand I'm yet not convinced how long the DRM-free selling point will be upheld and the offline installer packages are marked as "backup" feature, so GOG Galaxy is pushed further and maybe, at some point, even the possibility to have plain setup files will be gone. Who knows? GOG stopped being "the good guys" a long time ago, so I'm really sceptical anyways and that would be the point where the difference to steam is small enough. Right now I'm pissed off every fucking idiot needs to "establish" his own online launcher (uplay, steam, epic, origin, gog) and some of them even trying to force people to their infrastructure (epic, origin and uplay).

EDIT: btw GOG even intrudes in your privacy very hard for some time. Just take a look what domains are connected upon launching some titles (esp. via Galaxy) and, if you are techsavy enough, take a look at wireshark running in the background how interested they got ...

The moment GOG steps away from DRM-free is the moment GOG becomes irrelevant. Steam easily beats them in every other department, except for older games, maybe. Well, add Steam to the list because apart from their own games forcing you to use Steam, pretty much every physical games requires it as well. Wanna buy Kingdom Come: Deliverance at a store and play it? Well, install Steam, get an account and then you can. Even PC magazines force Steam onto you since their "full versions" of games are just Steam keys these days.

I didn't buy a game in a store for so many years, I forgot about it, but you are right: steam dominates this market. But I guess this is because of the publisher? At least I would guess Steam itself doesn't force publishers to sell from the shelf Steam exclusive. But you are absolutely right: magazines, physical packages and services like HumbleBundle force you to use Steam. I guess because Steam has a good backrecord on working most of the time (technically I mean) and to handle a vast amount of users (looking at Ubi Soft and their release fuck ups with their DRM servers... ^^). But GOG didn't fail for me also, but GOG has only a small percentage of the concurrent playerbase Steam has.

Well, publishers obviously highly prefer selling digital games over physical ones, so they were and are pushing in that direction. After all, you only sell licenses instead of games. Additionally, having the players tied to some service increases your control and also offers better chances for you making more money via DLC, microtransactions etc which you can easily add or patch in. Lastly, not releasing anything physical at all decreases the money you spent on the production of the game. Remember back then when publishers tried to get people to go digital? One big argument was that games will become cheaper due to not having to produce DVDs, the packaging etc. Well, that never happened. On the contrary, games became more expensive. Also, unlike the US, Europe was always way more pro-physical when it came to PC games but they still went ahead and got rid of a lot of physical games completely and replaced DRM-free versions with activation via Steam or just a Steam key. They knowingly sacked the playerbase that wouldn't make the jump to DRM because they knew the benefits would outweigh it, especially in the long-run.

And that exactly is the problem. HTML 5 is deprecated. The current W3C recommendation is HTML 5.2. HTML 5.3 also already exists as working draft.

Palemoon on the other hand uses the Goanna engine (which is a fork of Gecko, the old Firefox engine). According to Wikipedia it supports "HTML versions 3 and 4, and most of the living HTML5 standard." In other words it isn't even fully HTML 5 compatible, not to mention 5.1 or 5.2 compatible.

While Palemoon does get backported security fixes the featureset is frozen as far as I know. Which means that featurewise Palemoon has been outdated for at least 3-5 years. Which means that as time goes on you will find that more and more pages don't work properly with Palemoon.

GOG has already given an answer to the question how they intend to handle this problem: They don't have the manpower to test their page on every possible version of every possible browser so they officially only support the latest version of the most common browsers. If their page runs on that they don't consider it an error and won't fix it. If it doesn't run on the browser of your choice then update or change your browser.


While I don't like this answer either and would also prefer to use a different browser I also understand that a small company can't possibly write and maintain X versions of their homepage for X different browsers. So my solution to this problem was to install the portable version of the latest Firefox as secondary browser that I use for pages that don't work right in older browsers. You might want to do the same.

Join the club! :P
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/anyone_disliking_the_new_gog

As I already said on the topic, if you don't support many browsers, you should add a banner explaining it rather than breaking everything with the message "Welcome to the new GOG!" and answering two months later. You know, it was already a thing back when IE6 was being deprecated, around 15 years go.

You don't know. That it lags is arguable - it only fairly recently got CSS grid support, for example - but that its featureset is frozen can be easily disproved by checking the changelogs.

I also use Pale Moon as my main browser, but for GOG I use Opera. You can give that a try.

Last time i used an older browser that worked with GoG was 2 years ago...

Kinda sad...

Thanks for your recommendation, but Opera also alienated their userbase with some not so clever decisions which lead to a fork there and as Geralt already mentioned I could also use the portable Version of FF or could use whatever browser. But IE and Edge are already installed on my PC and I use them as fallback and with Edge the page is working ... only I hate using IE (which wouldn't help anyways) or Edge or another browser I decided against for some reason.

Also I absolutely understand that GOG can't deliver and maintain dozens of versions of their website, but how about simply not using "language features" no other website I frequent (which also feel modern) uses and breaks a lot of browsers?

We can discuss about how PHP, Java and now HTML is fucking with the world with their "deprecated" nonsense of language features they decided for in the first place and how they break a vast amount of infrastructure for many people and make the world worse. I understand that you have to cut bad decisions some times, but you also have a responsibility for them. However, it wouldn't change anything and there are people, like GOG seem to employ, which jump on the hippster hypetrain of dumb features the first chance they get. Oh, and ignoring the feedback of the userbase (like named browser developers) because "they know better"(tm).

You could use Chromium or Vivaldi if such things are your concern. Otherwise, I suggest throwing that tin hat in the recyclers.

Seriously, who cares?