Safari displays old Google version, why?

Hi, I got an iMac using Safari 5.1.10, recently every time I go to Google it's displaying the old interface (ie when I go to "Images", the images are displayed as the old version with little thumbnails with the info bellow etc...) If I go to Chrome and Firefox it doesn't happen, why? is there anything wrong recently with Google/Safari???
help, thanks.

Gabrielc said:

Hi, I got an iMac using Safari 5.1.10, recently every time I go to Google it's displaying the old interface (ie when I go to "Images", the images are displayed as the old version with little thumbnails with the info bellow etc...) If I go to Chrome and Firefox it doesn't happen, why? is there anything wrong recently with Google/Safari???
help, thanks.

Click to expand...

Exactly the same problem here. Normal google search also shows 'old style' results with underlined links too. Hope someone can help us out

Maybe it is tied to the older version of Safari?

Yosemite shows Safari as version 8.

harryb2448 said:

Maybe it is tied to the older version of Safari?

Yosemite shows Safari as version 8.

Click to expand...

Hi Harry, last Safari version is the 5.1.10 and it is updated automatically by Apple Software Update, I got the latest version, released end last year, it worked ok until couple of days ago...strange.

harryb2448 said:

Maybe it is tied to the older version of Safari?

Yosemite shows Safari as version 8.

Click to expand...

Hi Harry, maybe you gave the clue, there is a Safari 7 but you need OSX Mavericks (I'm on Lion at the moment) will update to Mavericks and comment for any news. thanks.

R_Rbnsn said:

Exactly the same problem here. Normal google search also shows 'old style' results with underlined links too. Hope someone can help us out

View attachment 20884

View attachment 20885

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Hi, are you working on Lion Safari 5.1? if so mabye we should switch to Mavericks...

I am on Yosemite Beta, but was on mavericks prior tot hat and found it to be fast and rock solid. Just check out Mavericks requirements as you have not advised your iMac details.

Gabrielc said:

Hi, are you working on Lion Safari 5.1? if so mabye we should switch to Mavericks...

Click to expand...

I'm running Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8).

Like you say it's been working fine until just a couple of days ago so I doubt it's anything to do with the OS. I don't really want to go through the whole OS update process just for the sake of Google displaying incorrectly.

Details pertain to iMac model as early intel iMacs cannot run Mavericks. Up to you but be aware Apple is not releasing any further Security Updates for Snow Leopard.

"Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

Google has started showing old versions of its search page to people using out-of-date versions of some web browsers."

BBC News - Google 'discourages' users of old browsers

As mentioned in the article I've now managed to fix it by changing my Safari user agent, tricking Google to think I'm running a newer version.

To do this go to Safari, open preferences > advanced > check the box for "Show develop menu".

In the develop menu go to user agent > Other... > and replace current text with:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.78.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.1.6 Safari/537.78.2

Unfortunately this is only a temporary fix as Safari doesn't save the changed user agent and reverts back whenever you close it. But at least now we know it's not a problem with our macs or browsers... Google is doing it deliberately.