The discussion revolves around reusing the crawler view to allow older devices to access Discourse forums. Ed_S suggested this idea, as their older iPad and iPhone can no longer render the forum correctly. They propose serving the crawler view to older browsers as a workaround.
jomaxro and david agree that this could be a good solution, especially for public sites that don’t require login. However, david notes that implementing this for login-required sites or secure categories would be more complicated.
Falco mentions that they suggested a similar idea previously and suggests adding old browsers to the crawler list. Justin_Vega praises david’s idea, and Falco announces that this feature has been implemented in version 2.5, providing a screenshot as evidence.
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
This has started to come up here and there in topics on Meta, thanks for creating a dedicated topic to track it.
I like the idea. Whether we show the crawler view itself, or some other “simplified” view that include no or minimal JS for older browsers is something I’d like to see supported.
I think this could be a good solution for old browsers. For public sites which don’t require login, it would be pretty easy to re-use the crawler view to provide a backwards-compatible read-only view.
It gets more complicated once you consider login_required sites, or sites with secure categories. If we want those to be accessible to older browsers, then we will need to re-implement the login and password reset flows in a compatible way.
Still achievable, but will require some development
I suggested exactly this a couple of weeks ago here on Meta. Adding old safari/ie/edge to the crawler list, and a change to add the browser update banner on top of the crawler view is much better than a blank screen.
For first version making it only for anons is plenty.
