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A comment on Google 'discourages' users of old browsers. Parent comment

Re:Google 'discourages' users of old browsers by yareally on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @05:46AM (#8256644)
As an Opera 12.x user I noticed them dropping support the other day. There's a huge difference in dropping support for 8-10 year old versions of IE and a browser that was receiving new features until the other year (and is still on par with most CSS/JS/HTML features of current browsers[1]). Especially when it's just search results. Opera themselves still recommends Opera 12 for long time users until all features are ported to the Blink based Opera and still patch it for security issues.

It's all done by user agent sniffing though, so if you're an Opera 12 user still and haven't found a way around it, you can switch the user agent to something like Mozilla for Google sites only in Opera's override.ini file and search results work just as they did the previous week. Other sites run by Google, such as the Android developer's console and Admob will also work correctly using this method. If unsure how to do that, here's an example[2].

Users of other browsers no longer "supported" could do something similar with an extension of some sort for their browser and just change the browser version of their user agent to something newer (something farther in the future would be a good idea).

[1] http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+11,firefox+34,chrome+40,safar...

[2] https://gist.github.com/yareally/7c6c76fb79fa5846665f

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google 'discourages' users of old browsers by Mithaldu on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @09:45AM (#8257472)
It can't be understated how disgusting this decision by Google is.

Opera 12 and Opera 15+ are completely different software packages that share literally and explicitly no code whatsoever.

One is a Chrome fork; the other a completely standalone program.

One is as bare-bone as browsers can get; the other has, out of the box, more features than any other browser on the market.

Not even the company producing Opera 15 asks its Opera 12 users to upgrade, since Opera ASA does know it is not an upgrade.

Yet Google decided to join the charade of Opera 15+ being an "upgrade" of Opera 12, since having another Chrome fork putting pressure for compatibility on websites furthers their goals.

[ Parent | on HN ]