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Google Attempts to Flush Out Old Browsers - with Mixed Results

posted by janrinok on Monday September 01 2014, @10:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-about-you-provide-search-results-and-leave-my-system-choices-alone dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Tuesday September 02 2014, @04:39PM

    by halcyon1234 (1082) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @04:39PM (#88557)

    I wish google could have a setting for this (akin to their google.com/ncr that sets a cookie to stop forwarding you to a national tld it would be great if they had a google.com/nojs to set a cookie if one wanted a useful interface for those prefering to use massive tabbing and absorbing information rather than wanting an experience)

    Closest I can get to it is:

    1. Append ?complete=0 to your google url. It kills the stupid autocomplete, so you can just type a search in.
    2. Disable as much javascript as you need via NoScript
    3. Add a Greasemonkey script. document.getElementsByName["s"][0].focus() so the search box is focused
    4. For bonus points, add a userscript to kill the search redirects privacy invaders. You know, when you click on a Google search result, and rather than going to example.com, you go to google.com/trackclickbullshit?result=example.com or something like that. Since userscripts.org is offline, here's a pastebin of my favorite one: http://pastebin.com/3tUCK72N [pastebin.com]
    5. Block whatever else you don't like with Element Hiding Helper

    You "miss out" on the Google Doodles, but really, you aren't missing much. You'll hear about the Doodles from friends, co-workers, news sites anyways. If it sounds like something you want to try, just open Internet Explorer and go to the homepage. Hopefully you'll get a Doodle instead of malware. Cointoss, really.

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