Google To Force Basic HTML Gmail On Older Chrome Versions (computerworld.com)

Earlier this week, Google quietly announced that Gmail will only be partially supported on older versions of Chrome browser soon. From a report: Users of Chrome version 53 and older editions of the browser could start being redirected to the basic HTML version of Gmail as early as December, the company said in a blog post. Starting next week, users who will be affected by the change will start seeing a banner at the top of Gmail telling them to upgrade to an up-to-date version of Google's browser. The affected browser versions include Chrome v49, the last version of the software that supports XP and Vista. While Microsoft officially ended support for XP more than two and a half years ago, Gmail has continued to work with it. Vista Service Pack 2 will reach the end of its extended support period on April 11.

Comments

So use

[rossdee]

Some other browser, like Opera or FireFox
Or don't use GMail in the first place

Re:So use

[Anonymous Coward]

Gogle is still way back in the 1990's in terms of Gmail's features. You can't even set an automatic reply address. Eudora could do that in the early 1990's or maybe even in the 1980's.

And now they want to only work in the latest Chrome. You could cut the irony with an automatic reply address. If you could, you know, actually use an automatic reply address.

Re:Hey google, fuck yourself

[Jetstream]

I will continue to use XP on my desktop and if Google doesn't like it, they can release a newer version for XP. Screw 'em.

User Agent?

[jenningsthecat]

If the user agent string is configurable in those older Chrome versions, that should solve the problem. If changing the user agent doesn't solve the problem, then perhaps Google has been doing something shady in their browsers all along.

Also, if Google is going to stick users of older Chrome versions with basic HTML, I wonder what they'll get up to with other brands of browser.

I'm so glad I never liked Chrome and never liked Gmail, so I never used them. It's bad enough that their search engine has mostly become a steaming pile of irrelevancy that can't tell the difference between a user trying to drill down through the clouds of shit they throw up, and a bot. I'm getting really sick of being forced to go through endless captchas as a result of Google's 'lowest common denominator' philosophy.

Re:User Agent?

[CronoCloud]

Doesn't Gmail's generic POP3 or IMAP settings work with Outlook?

https://support.google.com/mai...

Re:XP should be supported

[ShanghaiBill]

... cutting them off because ...

They are not being "cut off". They are just being downgraded to something that is still functional, but not as fancy.

Re:Hey google, fuck yourself

[Rakarra]

At some point, every team has to make a decision on how much effort should go into supporting "legacy systems." Maybe they made internal changes that don't work under XP, require Microsoft libraries that weren't released for Windows XP, etc. At that point you then have to write and maintain two different code paths, one for XP and earlier and one for 7 and later. The point eventually came where they decided the XP codepaths were too much for too little benefit. I don't know what challenges they had to face, but this is a choice that just about every software project makes eventually.

YES! Time to downgrade Chrome!

[cpotoso]

My goodness, gmail's interface is so freaking bad that perhaps going back to a simple HTML it may become useful. Some good news at last.

Re:YES! Time to downgrade Chrome!

[evilviper]

Yes indeed, I've been using the basic HTML GMail interface for years now, never liking their slow JS version that blocks every time you click on anything.

I've posted instructions to do so before:
http://pipedot.org/2TPQ