Google no longer serving up Firefox 2 compatible search

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  • Another oddity I just noticed, when I search and click on a link, this search page tacks on a bunch of crap to the URL. It looks like “?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixwfrtxKfnAhVum-AKHaRSAncQFjAAegQIAhAB” Some sites like Winworldpc.com seem to correct for this or ignore it, but for others, this causes problems. Specifically I noticed this screws up any searches on vcfed.org for any recent threads that are not yet “archived”.

  • roytam1 has dropped some nt 3.51/win95/vanilla win2k compatible browsers with TLS 1.2 support:

    https://msfn.org/board/topic/180462-my-browser-builds-part-2/?do=findComment&comment=1177052

  • And now with this new "Polymer" pretty much any browser except Chrome will have serious rendering issues. In addition to the performance hit from heavy javascript reliance just to make a flat UI bog standard HTML could do and useless animations.

    The epiphany of poor web design and the ability to flush out competitors.

  • edited February 2020

    I knew the search changes were a sign of things to come. I've been getting a notice the past few days that the good version of YouTube is going away.
    ">

  • Even so, YouTube Classic still forces the classic look anyway. I just tested this yesterday the first time I saw it.

  • I would expect to see that break once Google removes it. All that add-on does is tell YouTube to serve up the old version of the site.

  • edited February 2020

    The only way is one of those addons that change the page as/when it's loaded.

    Ugh, javascript was never supposed to BE the webpage. It was supposed to supplement it. We were supposed to rely on things like CSS for those animations and other fanciness.

    With all this external framework reliance resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of scripts required for a webpage that means only the chance of an intrusion increasing. More data breaches and it's unfortunate that this trend will only increase.

  • What's sort of funny is that we have the most complex web pages ever (code-wise), but today's websites are some of the ugliest I've ever seen, with some of the most confusing navigation ever, like news sites that completely get rid of the article you were reading if you scroll down too far, or happen to click anywhere outside of it.

  • edited February 2020

    CSS could do all of that (good/bad), and faster.
    It's just "developers" don't want to spend the time to write all the CSS. It's just too 'abstract' and seemingly tedious for them.

    Much of the reason JS is so slow is because developers stick to runtime compiling, taxing the resources of the end-user. There are ways to make JS fast, but most don't want to spend the time to put that effort in balancing precompilation/preparsing and script prioritization. They're already cheaping out relying on JS. I'd wager most "web developers" don't even know they precompile much of their JS aspects. Or even heard of it.

    Over 3/4 of pages have no load optimization whatsoever in the first place. Content should be loaded before all else, but no. Instead you'll find useless garbage loaded before the page has anything useful. Often because the script(s) that holds the content is deep in a sea of scripts. Not to mention a lot of times huge amounts of scripts are dumped in and attempted to load at once, then chaining and loading more. This adds up with all these scripts loading running at once.

    It is largely because of these factors the increase in difficulty of older browsers and machines on modern pages. And if you'll notice, Google spends no seemingly measurable effort trying to improve their site performance.

  • @nick99nack said:
    All that add-on does is tell YouTube to serve up the old version of the site.

    Not unless the developer of it creates a back-up version of the old version and loads that up instead. If supposing the add-on does break, then that's fine, as long as YouTube doesn't cause unnecessary CPU usage when watching a damn video (yet Google Maps used to do that as well but not anymore).

  • edited February 2020

    YouTube already causes lots of "unnecessary CPU usage" when watching the damn videos. At times I struggle to watch 360p when a 720p video only uses about 30% of my CPU in WMP9.

    I'm really dreading this Polymer2 shit. Looks like I'll have to rely on the "9xwebhelper" script to watch YouTube in future.

    And I still don't get why they removed annotations, destroying interesting information about 10+ year old videos. **** googol!!! **** googol!!!

  • edited February 2020

    update: just realized that this is a duplicate. not sure how this happened. please remove.

  • Almost had a bit of a scare when gmail finally logged me out one of my older web browser. They still have the lightweight and more compatible Gmail theme thankfully, but everything else around it requires scripting to do bullcrap animations and such.

    I had to dig around for a login linked that worked.

    The link: https://mail.google.com/mail/login?hl=en will serve up a proper login page if it detects an older browser. Although if it throws up its verification check, you are screwed.

  • Youtube is also starting to kill the classic layout. Opening the site with a FF42 user agent on my 2012R2 laptop gave me Polymer v1 with a notice that "my browser is no longer supported" but it still gives me the classic layout with the same user agent on Windows 2000.

  • edited March 2020

    Typing this from my computer as I'm trying to shift most of my usage back to my computer. I just had trouble logging into this forum on Firefox on my phone. After I logged in, the forum's homepage showed that I was logged in, but it acted weird. When I navigated to "Software", it appeared as if it logged out. When I tried navigating to the first page of that thread, it took me to the second page (showing me logged in)! Then it tried it in Chrome and did not see any of those issues.

    At school, I've noticed on one academic site right after I logged in, it displayed no content at all on IE11 on my math teacher's ThinkPad T430. It worked in Chrome, Edge, and (from what I've been told) Firefox, though. Another academic site (on which I had to take an online test) didn't work on Edge on that same laptop, but worked on Chrome on a Chromebook.

    I agree that we're moving back to a closed web. Chrome is not very customizable (especially the mobile version), very bloated, and at least a little buggy. Oh, and it spies on you. And yet, the majority of people are continuing to use it.

    UPDATE: A few months ago, I've noticed that trying to load Mozilla's website on Firefox 12 on my Windows 2000 VM caused the VM to restart.

  • The end is nigh for the classic YouTube look... I hope somebody here has the entire coding for it backed up, so it can be put to good use whenever. If not, I may have to steer away from YouTube for good. Don't wish to go on a site and it takes seconds longer to load, despite having a fast internet connection. Facebook however is the worst offender in terms of slower loading speeds and heavy scripting causing it.

  • edited April 2020

    I had to go to a videoconferencing site today and had to use it in Chrome. The other person I talked to with my computer couldn't get it to work in another browser (probably M$ Edge (pre-Chromium)) so he had to download Chrome. The site even SAID that Chrome was the "recommended" browser. When will those people learn?

    Side note: Due to the coronavirus pandemic and schools being closed temporarily, I had to visit that website as part of my school's online education.

  • edited April 2020

    Educational sites (plus M$ Teams) are so fucking stupid.

    Forums, news sites, porn sites, online shopping sites and even online banking sites have no qualms about running on Pale Moon/New Moon/Serpent on Windows 2000 or 2003 with the default user agent, but the myriad of websites that my teachers insist on to submit my work always have issues. Some need a custom UA with Firefox/99.9 to use certain features, and one in particular broke in non-Chromium browsers for a time.

    And now I've been forced to create a presentation in an online app instead of reliable locally-based PowerPoint. And it tells me that my Serpent 52 is no longer (probably never) supported! I circumvented the browser block on my ThinkPad T60 and got this:

    (yeah I know I'm using a mobility radeon x1300 with drivers from 2008 but it's never stopped me before!)

    Firefox x64 is listed as a supported browser, but this just tells me that they have no interest in supporting it. We have just went back 20 years. Back to browser discrimination.

    And it doesn't even like the DX9 acceleration that XP x64 provides. I guess I'll have to try wined3d on Windows 2000. And even the D3D9ex on win2k is blocked in some way!

    UPDATE: well, it basically forced me to install windows 10. sigh. but not too bad once open-shell and simplewall are installed.

  • Meh, I was cooking with a Pentium M 740 complete with 1gb of ram and Vista wif conventional PCI FX5500 just yesterday. Thing is slow. Had to turn on DWM to actually boost performance I kid you not. 7 was worse, for all you 7 diehards (I heart Vista). I ought to pull the 780 out of my D600 and see if the board can go up to 2.26GHz despite being a 400MHz fsb (manual claims it can go to 2.2GHz, doubtful).
    As the D600, who has 400MHz FSB, has a hardware limit and would underclock a 780 to 1.7GHz despite the CPU being rated 2.26GHz. The clock-gen mod brought the FSB to 33% higher to 533MHz, creating an "overclock" which also mathematically also adds 33% to the cpu clock, causing it to run at native 2.26GHz. Hopefully this board doesn't have the same limitation in its clock generator. I do not want to go shorting some PLCC leads with solder again.

    I digress.
    These sites are why I slapped a Chrome useragent in my Pale Moon. What happened? An assortment of things that caused me to spit out profanity when I realized many sites deliberately broke when served a non-chrome useragent.

    I've started using the Chrome Edge for sites that are still broke despite the switched agent. I have 14 heavy tasks open, and it's pulling 101.8mb ram. A little better than latest Google's "official" which pulls about 183.2mb with these same tabs.

  • @win32 said:
    Educational sites (plus M$ Teams) are so fucking stupid.

    Forums, news sites, porn sites, online shopping sites and even online banking sites have no qualms about running on Pale Moon/New Moon/Serpent on Windows 2000 or 2003 with the default user agent, but the myriad of websites that my teachers insist on to submit my work always have issues. Some need a custom UA with Firefox/99.9 to use certain features, and one in particular broke in non-Chromium browsers for a time.

    And now I've been forced to create a presentation in an online app instead of reliable locally-based PowerPoint. And it tells me that my Serpent 52 is no longer (probably never) supported! I circumvented the browser block on my ThinkPad T60 and got this:

    (yeah I know I'm using a mobility radeon x1300 with drivers from 2008 but it's never stopped me before!)

    Firefox x64 is listed as a supported browser, but this just tells me that they have no interest in supporting it. We have just went back 20 years. Back to browser discrimination.

    And it doesn't even like the DX9 acceleration that XP x64 provides. I guess I'll have to try wined3d on Windows 2000. And even the D3D9ex on win2k is blocked in some way!

    UPDATE: well, it basically forced me to install windows 10. sigh. but not too bad once open-shell and simplewall are installed.

    use an user agent override to spoof as win10 firefox 68 instead.

  • @win32 said:
    Educational sites (plus M$ Teams) are so fucking stupid.

    Forums, news sites, porn sites, online shopping sites and even online banking sites have no qualms about running on Pale Moon/New Moon/Serpent on Windows 2000 or 2003 with the default user agent, but the myriad of websites that my teachers insist on to submit my work always have issues. Some need a custom UA with Firefox/99.9 to use certain features, and one in particular broke in non-Chromium browsers for a time.

    The dumbest part about sites refusing to work on Firefox/Gecko is that there isn't even anything that these sites need that Firefox/Gecko doesn't have. Sure, 52 is not exactly brand new, but it should support everything that those sites need.

  • edited April 2020

    Great, it is "We only support Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0" all over again.

    It is not that they won't "work", but the companies are to lazy/stupid to test in anything else, and refuse to "support" anything they did not test and certify. Then address potential support problems by idiotically just blocking anything they don't "support".

    There was some talk about eliminating HTTP user agents all together, requiring code to test each browsers capabilities. In theory that would eliminate this kind of asshattery, but what would REALLY happen is that such a "test" would poke around in such a way that it essentially determines the browser version/OS/platform just like the user agent - and asshats would keep blocking based on that.

    Also, part of the problem lies in the insane complexity idiots stuff in to "web" craplications these dats. Stuff like an "on-line presentation" program has absolutely no business being a "web" application. It will break when the wind blows from the south.

  • edited April 2020

    @roytam1 said:
    use an user agent override to spoof as win10 firefox 68 instead.

    Thanks, that did help considerably. Viewing is possible, but editing is impossible on my win2k installs, even the one with wined3d binaries!!

    I was able to access the editing UI under XP x64, but it was nonfunctional, probably due to these missing binaries, as revealed in dependency walker:

    dxgi.dll

    d3d11.dll (so the DX9 requirement is very misleading)

    dcomp.dll

    d3dcompiler_47.dll

    I will try copying them over to my XP x64 along with the other wined3d stuff from the One-Core-API binaries. But it proves that my replacement of Vista with Windows 10 was an overreaction.

    These hardware fascists will explicitly block any browser from editing if the user agent does not contain "Win64; x64". So many people are uninformed about x86 OSes with full PAE. Not that it matters, as Serpent/New Moon are not RAM hogs on 2 GB of RAM.

  • @Bry89 said:
    The end is nigh for the classic YouTube look... I hope somebody here has the entire coding for it backed up, so it can be put to good use whenever. If not, I may have to steer away from YouTube for good. Don't wish to go on a site and it takes seconds longer to load, despite having a fast internet connection. Facebook however is the worst offender in terms of slower loading speeds and heavy scripting causing it.

    What's interesting is that I'm no longer seeing the "This version of YouTube is going away soon" message, and it looks like the add-on is changing the URL to disable polymer:

  • Yes, I saw that when I just noticed its update (as evidenced by the change of its icon). Although, whenever I have it disabled, I still have the classic look yet when under a private window, I have the new look. Strange...

  • Yesterday, Vetusware started requiring HTTPS, and whatever encryption method it wants does not work in Retrozilla.

  • edited May 2020

    Somehow, YouTube classic remains functional. The only polymer-exclusive features are like ones to complain about "toxic" search results and to declare videos as COPPA-compliant.

    But the idiots will no longer let me search for videos on channel pages and have obscured view tallies from videos where comments have been disabled (I mean, "turned off" since the former term probably failed PC compliance). But in the latter case, you can still see the view counts when searching for the videos.

    And video results for "youtube discontinued classic" or "youtube to discontinue classic" mostly turn up results for "NES Classic discontinued" which is very irrelevant. I was expecting some rants (as I remember with earlier UI changes from about a decade ago) but I guess it's another form of youtube censorship. Some deeper digging revealed a few tutorials to reenable classic so at least there is some resistance, albeit not hardware-related.

    I want voodoo dolls for my birthday.

    UPDATE And just right after I said that, I got a "please update your browser" message. fuck.

    Also, Government of Canada websites began requiring TLS 1.2 earlier this year but Retrozilla doesn't like it.

  • @win32 said:
    UPDATE And just right after I said that, I got a "please update your browser" message. fuck.

    I haven't tested Linux yet, but the Vista laptop I'm on right now switched to the new polymer layout. I dislike the layout, but the site does seem to work just fine in Mypal.

  • @nick99nack said:

    @win32 said:
    UPDATE And just right after I said that, I got a "please update your browser" message. fuck.

    I haven't tested Linux yet, but the Vista laptop I'm on right now switched to the new polymer layout. I dislike the layout, but the site does seem to work just fine in Mypal.

    Sometimes it brings up polymer with the Firefox/42.0 user agent, but most times it doesn't. I even get a unsupported browser warning with polymer using that UA.

    If it comes down to the wire, I'll be very aggressive in blocking scripts and UI elements to keep viewing videos on my Pentium M laptop. No way I'm giving up my portable daily driver, especially if it dual boots with 98SE.

  • @win32 said:
    If it comes down to the wire, I'll be very aggressive in blocking scripts and UI elements to keep viewing videos on my Pentium M laptop. No way I'm giving up my portable daily driver, especially if it dual boots with 98SE.

    Do it. I have done the same with my D600, and coupled with the addition of another gb of ram made daily use rather decent. It chugs along with Windows 2000 (which it has the license sticker for), and it continues to bring back memories.
    Hold on to that Pentium M for as long as you can.

    One day I'm going to recell that battery. Then there will be nothing holding me back from bringing this this around with me (except covid).

    offtopic
    I've drawn some funny faces at a Starbucks where I used it one time. Especially with its mediabay zip drive, and me swapping zip drives someone asked me why I'm using such archaic technology.
    My reply: It works. Can you say the same about your tablet or laptop after nearly 20 years?

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