New HTTP status code for unsuitable browsers

It’s a pain to support old versions of Internet Explorer! How annoying is it? Even Google has dropped support for IE8 and then IE9. Unfortunately, many institutions like hospitals and government agencies have computer systems that still have not fully updated their technological infrastructure. Whenever I get feedback that a website I’ve made doesn’t work properly it’s usually from a user who is still running an old version of Internet Explorer. I feel like there should be a way to strongly encourage the upgrade process.

tl;dr I want a new HTTP Status Code (212) for Unsuitable Browsers

Some websites conditionally add a div instructing users to update their browser. I’m wondering whether to take this a step further by adding some middleware that will check if the User-Agent of incoming requests is ‘ancient’ and change the status code. The irony is not lost on me that these old browsers won’t do anything with this new status code, but I hope that this could help us avoid having another IE6 problem. This new code (212) would tell browsers that they need to instruct users to upgrade to get the best experience.

So, I was wondering if any of the current HTTP Status Codes are suitable? None of the 2xx codes indicate this information, but would probably be most appropriate since the request is processed successfully. So I started looking at the 4xx codes for inspiration. Here are the candidates I looked at:

• 406 - Not Acceptable: This is intended to indicate that things like MIME-type, charsets, encodings, or languages do not match the request Accept headers.
• 412 - Precondition Failed: This is basically the opposite of what we’re looking for. This is saying that the server does not meet the requirements laid out by the client.
• 415 - Unsupported Media Type: This is meant to be used in cases like when a client tries to upload an unsupported format. That isn’t the problem with the requests received from these pesky browsers.
• 417 - Expectation Failed: This isn’t appropriate since this problem does not depend on the presence of an Expect request header.
• 422 - Unprocessable Entity: This indicates that there are semantic errors in a well formed request, but this is not true in the case of old browsers.
• 426 - Upgrade Required: This is basically the model I was going for. But, this is intended to tell users that a client needs to switch to a different protocol rather than to a different browser.
• 428 - Precondition Required: This indicates that the server requires the request to be conditional to help avoid the ‘lost update’ problem. But with old browsers we’re not dealing with problems that would result on the server. We’re talking about problems that would result in the browser.

Because 412 is essentially the opposite of what I’m looking for and because there does not currently appear to be a 212 status code, I think that we should adopt the following:

• 212 - Valid Request with Unsuitable Client: This is intended to indicate that while the request was successfully processed by the server, issues may arise on the client side due to an outdated browser.

Maybe this could remind people to run updates regularly. If not, oh well. That just leaves us with status code 418: I am a teapot.

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