Hacker News Reader

Comment by staplung | Hacker News Reader

> Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway)

The fallback HTML mode for web search is still there (two flavors even!). You just have to pretend to be an ancient browser.

Using a user agent for something like Firefox 6 will give you a stripped down but still basically modern look and pretending to be something really ancient will get you another, even more basic, HTML version.

I left long ago but the web search team at Google was always pretty serious about making sure you could access results, even from your ancient Timex Sinclair that you hand-whittled out of mammoth bone or whatever.

Gmail is a different story. The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out. IMAP still works though.

View on HN

> The old HTML mode is still there but is hard to get to and is supposedly going to be phased out.

Can you share any info on how to access it?

Trying https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (the /h/ on the end being the old way to get Basic HTML mode) just redirects back to the normal view and changes the loading screen to say "We're loading the latest Gmail version."

Setting my user-agent to IE6, or IE11 in compatibility mode, produces a "Temporary Error (500)" screen that says "We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. You can view the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for the current status of the service."

After several tries, I managed to click the blue "here" before it disappeared. It took me to a help page that does not offer basic HTML, namely:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?authuser=0&visi...

So if the basic HTML mode is still buried in there somewhere, how do you get to it, if only for nostalgia's sake?

Can you still actually get a list of search results with the HTML web search?

I'm developing a new browser engine which has modern CSS features but no JS support, and we were testing with google.com (we can render the modern homepage), but as of mid last year they seem to:

- Hard require JS if you pretend to be Chrome

- Give you an ancient html-only form if you give a custom user agent, which works for "I'm feeling lucky" searches but still requires JS for the results page.

Does Search have a basic HTML mode too? Might be worth trying it if so.

There's https://ddg.gg if you don't mind using duckduckgo

Yes, and Firefox Mobile falls into it by default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com