I gather that supporting ever-older browsers is out of scope. I can use the wayback machine as a sort of proxy but this gives me an idea: can we re-use the existing crawler view and serve it up to older browsers?
For context, I have an older iPad which no longer renders anything for my forum, and a not-so-old iPhone which shows a blank page until the tab is swapped in from the tab manager. Neither device can be updated. As a workaround I can use the 404 page as a kind of index and then use /print view to see particular threads.
These are my user agents:
- Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.3.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14G60 Safari/602.1
- Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 9_3_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/601.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/58.0.3029.113 Mobile/13G36 Safari/601.1.46
Perhaps related, the recent update to crawler detection which inspects user agents:
Smarter handling of random crawler traffic