I would argue that is a good thing and in the case of Spring, doesn't feel true. In part, Spring is so hard to learn because it has too much support for legacy stuff (though this may have changed in the last few years).
The only issue with not supporting retro-compatibility is because the JVM doesn't support retro compatibility. I recently tried to upgrade an application to the latest version of Java (I think it was Java 12) and found that date formaters were completely changed to match an ISO standard which broke a lot of code. We also found a similar problem with the Java 8 transition as well forcing a huge upgrades to our libraries.
I am of the view that libraries and frameworks should support not support retro compatibility but the language should. This way, if you don't want to upgrade your library then you don't have to.
Using the web as an example, old Angular JS applications still work today as they did back when they were first written. I doubt applications written in the first version of Spring will work with the latest version of the JVM.
I daily drive FF and even develop using it. Everyone else in the company use Chrome. Recently one of our clients complained about a performance issue, I tried to replicate it on my fast PC, but could not replicate. The people who could replicate it were on Chrome, but when they followed the replication steps in FF, the problem disappeared.
Google web applications still not great, but still usable I find. Facebook performance isn't great either.
I only test in Firefox, because FF is my browser of choice. Everyone else in the office only tests on Chrome because that is their browser of choice. We all know it is wrong, but cross browser compatibility makes it so much easier to forget that there are subtle differences.
Fun fact, we recently found a performance issue on one of our products which I was completely unaware of because it didn't affect. Even now, we cannot get Chrome to match FF's performance especially (of all things) for Google maps. Just goes to show that basic assumptions that Chrome is faster than Firefox are not 100% accurate. Like most things, it depends.
I use Firefox day in and day out and the only time I have found myself using Chrome is when I have to do profiling and even then that is because profiling tools in all browsers kinda sucks.
I have often wondered what is the killer feature that Chrome dev tools has that Firefox does not that forces people to switch back to Chrome as this seems to be a common refrain and while I don't work on the dev tools I sometimes wonder what awesome feature I am missing in Chrome...
In some cases, I actually find Chrome lacking. For example, the ability to see what events are attached to a dom element.
DISCLAIMER: I do not work on the developer tools for Chrome or Firefox and don't do much CSS.
"Frameworks do not keep retro-compatibility"
I would argue that is a good thing and in the case of Spring, doesn't feel true. In part, Spring is so hard to learn because it has too much support for legacy stuff (though this may have changed in the last few years).
The only issue with not supporting retro-compatibility is because the JVM doesn't support retro compatibility. I recently tried to upgrade an application to the latest version of Java (I think it was Java 12) and found that date formaters were completely changed to match an ISO standard which broke a lot of code. We also found a similar problem with the Java 8 transition as well forcing a huge upgrades to our libraries.
I am of the view that libraries and frameworks should support not support retro compatibility but the language should. This way, if you don't want to upgrade your library then you don't have to.
Using the web as an example, old Angular JS applications still work today as they did back when they were first written. I doubt applications written in the first version of Spring will work with the latest version of the JVM.