14 DAY TRIAL // Google really doesn’t like it when people use old web browser versions, so it’s doing its best to force people to make the change.
There are plenty of reasons why Google would force the hand of users, the biggest of them all being the security issues that using an outdated web browser brings.
The Register reports that Google has been pushing a stale version of the search engine’s homepage. This is similar to what the company does with other products of its own, including Gmail, which Google doesn’t fully support on aged browsers.
The company’s forum was filled this past weekend with discussions about the old Google search engine interface that was delivered to users who refused to update their Opera and Safari browsers.
“A few minutes ago, Google's homepage reverted to the old version for me. I'm using Opera 12.17. If I search for something, the results are shown with the current Google look, but the homepage itself is the old look with the black bar across the top. It seems to affect only the Google homepage and image search. If I click on ‘News’, for instance, it's fine,” one user, called DJSigma, wrote.
He later complains that when searching for something he has to use the old interface, even though the results come in the new format. Looking for a new topic, however, required DJSigma to go back to the homepage since the search box stopped working.
It seems that the problem extended to more users, as well as to people using Safari 5.1.x versions. People were able to bypass this by playing around with the browser user agents by making the page appear to come from a newer version of the app without actually making the necessary steps.
Speculations ran back and forth until one Google employee came forth and confirmed that the issues were not caused by a bug.
“Thanks for the reports. I want to assure you this isn’t a bug, it’s working as intended,” the Googler said. She added that they were always making improvements to Search, so they could only provide some limited support for outdated browsers.
The issue seemed to extend to Chrome as well, but upon pointing this out, the “bug” was resolved, which is funny because it looks like Google can support Search for its own older browser versions, but not for other developers.