Usage of Unsupported Technologies in Websites Worldwide

Abstract

Websites using unsupported 3^rd party technologies (libraries, frameworks, plugins, etc) are generally not recommended, especially due to security issues that are left unfixed. However, upgrading to supported technologies is also challenging, hence not all web maintainers upgrade their technology dependencies. Measuring the existence of unsupported technologies in the wild may contribute to the sense of urgency in keeping technologies updated. Our research proposed a method to measure the existence of unsupported technologies in international websites, using HTTP Archive as the data source. The contribution from our research is the method as well as the snapshot result from January 2023 data. The method is composed of four steps, namely: identify the list of websites, identify technologies used, group by technology names and retrieve currently supported versions, and compare versions between usage and supported versions. From the January 2023 data, we found several interesting results. One is that the higher the website rank is, the higher the number of supported technologies used. Another finding was that worldwide websites also generally use more supported versions of technologies, compared to Indonesian websites. Further research may be performed for longitudinal analysis of technology support evolution.