The most annoying thing about this is not that Opera 12.17 no longer works with Google's sites. That I could understand. It's that Google are browser sniffing and saying "nope, can't use that anymore". If you spoof the user agent to make it seem like you're using Firefox 31, Google's sites work absolutely fine in Opera 12.17 again.
Here's how to do that: -
1. Fire up Opera and go to your local version of Google's homepage.
2. Press F12, choose "Edit site preferences..." and hit OK to close that screen. Exit Opera.
3. Browse to this folder: -
C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Opera
4. Open override.ini in Notepad.
5. Look for the block of code that relates to your local version of Google's site and add this line to the end of it: -
User Prefs|Custom User-Agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0
6. Save the file.
That will get you the current version of Google's homepage back and everything will work fine.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
