Google Serves Old Search Page To Old Browsers 152
Rambo Tribble writes: In an apparent move to push those using older browsers to update, Google is reported to be serving outdated search pages to said browsers. The older pages lack features available on the newer versions, and this policy compounds with the limits announced in 2011 on Gmail support for older web clients. As a Google engineer put it, "We're continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers." The BBC offers a fairly comprehensive analysis.
Re:Slashdot Beta (Score:2, Informative)
Awesome! I already had the redirector installed to make all NYTimes pages come up with pagewanted=all, it never occurred to me to use it on Buck Feta!
FWIW:
... *nytimes.com/*pagewanted=1 ....... $1nytimes.com/$2pagewanted=all ...... Wildcard
Include pattern
Redirect to
Pattern type
Re:A solution to a problem (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, and that's precisely what I've been doing. Firefox + UAControl = score :)
I get to use normal-looking and convenient Google maps (instead of the recent monstrosity that shows up in Safari and other "current" browsers)
I can easily remove trackback links (because Google returns them in plain text to IE6 but goes to great lengths to obfuscate them for current browsers)
And otherwise Google looks clean and neat.
This is one feature of Google I happen to love :)
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't notice the problem you're mentioning about link visited being broken. I searched twice for myself, the first time I clicked on one of my links. After the second search, that link was correctly colored purple, as it should. However, I did notice a small delay before it turned from blue to purple.
And there are no tracking cookies or similar inserted into the links, just the plain links. Overall a good experience :-)
I didn't check though whether the results were maybe outdated (newer pages not listed...), that would be nasty...
Affected Browsers (non scientific) (Score:5, Informative)
By changing the User Agent string on my brower I found that the following are affected by this:
IE9
FF6.0
Chrome 4
Safari 5
And all versions of Opera before they used the blink engine.
Possibly more when I have the time.
The timeline on when these came out is wavy as hell.