Dying Stack
8 min readLast reviewed: June 2025
Technologies losing ground — the graveyard and the intensive care unit.
The Graveyard: Truly Dead Technologies
Some technologies are completely gone. Using them today would be malpractice:
| Technology | What It Was | Why It's Dead |
|---|---|---|
| Flash | Animated content, games in browsers | Insecure, proprietary, mobile hostile. Killed by iPhone/HTML5. |
| Internet Explorer | Microsoft's browser | Slow, insecure, standards-non-compliant. Officially died June 2022. |
| Table Layouts | HTML tables for page layout | Non-semantic, inflexible. CSS Flexbox/Grid made it obsolete. |
| Java Applets | Client-side Java execution in browsers | Massive security holes, terrible user experience. Never really worked. |
| Silverlight | Microsoft's Flash competitor | Proprietary, complex, lost to HTML5/JavaScript. |
| AngularJS v1 | Early Angular framework (2009) | Replaced by Angular 2+. Legacy code bases are dying assets. |
| SOAP/XML | Web services protocol | REST and JSON replaced it. Still in legacy enterprise systems. |
The Intensive Care Unit: Declining Technologies
Some technologies are still in use but clearly declining. They work, but starting a new project with them is risky:
| Technology | Status / Trajectory | What to Do |
|---|---|---|
| PHP 7.x (pre-8.0) | Widely used but being phased out | Upgrade to PHP 8+ if you must use PHP |
| WordPress (Classic Editor) | Still 43% of sites but declining for new projects | Migrate to modern headless or use Gutenberg |
| jQuery | Was ubiquitous, now mostly unnecessary | Modern browsers eliminated the need for jQuery |
| Shared Hosting | Still common but losing to cloud and platforms | Move to VPS, PaaS, or managed cloud |
| Third-Party Cookies | Being phased out by browsers | Adapt to first-party data and privacy-first approaches |
| CSS Floats | Replaced by Flexbox and Grid | Use Flexbox/Grid for layouts |
| Less (CSS Preprocessor) | Being replaced by Sass, modern CSS | Use Sass if you need a preprocessor |
| Drupal 7/8 | Version 7 EOL, version 8 being phased out | Migrate to Drupal 9+ or consider alternatives |
| Magento 1 | EOL since 2020, extremely insecure | Migrate to Magento 2 or switch to Shopify/WooCommerce |
The Hiring Risk: Declining Technologies Get Expensive
As technology declines, fewer people learn it. You must either:
- Pay premium salaries to attract legacy developers
- Accept lower quality because you can only hire people unwilling/unable to learn modern tech
- Rewrite to a modern stack and rebuild expertise
Option 3 is usually cheapest in the long run. Technical debt eventually comes due.
Signs a Technology is Dying
- Hiring pool shrinking: Few new developers learning it
- Community stagnation: Fewer packages, libraries, or updates
- Browser/platform support ending: Official support being dropped
- Security vulnerabilities unfixed: Maintainers no longer care
- Better alternatives exist: A newer tech does the job better
- Major companies abandoning it: Tech giants voting with their feet
Legacy Code Risk
Inheriting a codebase in a dying technology is expensive. You're hiring to maintain something, not build something. Consider: can we rewrite faster than we can maintain?
When Legacy Technology Makes Sense
Sometimes using "old" tech is pragmatic:
- Existing large codebase: Rewriting is expensive. Maintain and gradually migrate.
- Profitable business: If WordPress powers your successful business, maintain it rather than chase trends.
- Rare expertise available: If you have a talented Drupal expert on staff, you have an advantage.
- Niche community support: Some dying technologies have devoted communities (e.g., Perl has been dying for 20 years but still has users).
Evaluating Your Current Stack's Health
If your stack is getting old, ask:
- Is it still secure? (Are vulnerabilities being patched?)
- Is it still performant? (Does it meet modern speed expectations?)
- Can we hire for it? (Are good people available and affordable?)
- Is it holding us back? (Does newer tech offer advantages we need?)
- Cost of migration vs. cost of maintenance?
If the answers are "no, no, no, yes, expensive rewrite," plan a migration strategy. Start by replacing one piece at a time if possible.