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frojack writes:

The Mighty Buzzard (no not our Buzzard, This Buzzard), aka ElReg, reports that Google is serving up ancient renditions of its search engine to users of "ancient" browsers. They also tried this with Gmail, but finally just gave up and refused to support old browsers.

The old version of Search still delivers modern "hits", but the layout is decidedly old school.

Probably as a stunt, or to prevent having to maintain web page code long since obsolete, the search pages are simply rendered in the way they would have appeared when these older browsers were fresh on the scene. The search entry page looks slightly old, (says 2913), but the search result layout is decidedly old school.

Opera 12, Safari 5 are seeing old version, as well as some other older versions of Windows, including ancient IE 6.0

One user posted screen shots on Google Forums. One shot of Google's Image looking like a refuge from the Pleistocene.

Its not that some of these browsers can't handle the newer Search layout. They worked fine until a day ago. Some browsers (Midori) are also getting the geezer treatment even though Midori handles all the latest web technologies like HTML 5 and CSS3, and is based on fairly recent webkit engine, and had no problems rendering Google's search, or even Bing's more intensive image search.

It appears to be just Google's way of saying its time to move on. Maybe it will backfire. I kind of like the old look.