Google Chrome Ending Support for Windows XP and Vista, All You Need To Know

And also for Mac OSX 10.6 /7/8. Windows XP became the most used operating system during its run and why not, it was one of the first Windows OS with so much colors and new features, its legacy it such phenomenal that a big share of OS market still use XP.

What could go wrong suddenly? When you receive a notification saying "This computer will soon stop receiving Google Chrome Updates" you are devastated! But why? It's not that Chrome hates XP or old system, it's for reasons that are legit.

Why Can't Chrome Keep Supporting Windows XP

Many, many people still run on the legendary OS by Microsoft, that's Windows XP, then why all of a sudden Chrome is acting like they don't care about their users? Let's have a little background check on the case.

Microsft announce earlier in 2014 that they would end support for Windows XP later that year and then they did it. Support for Windows XP was subsequently ended on 8th April 2014, here is the release from Microsoft on the topic: https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/WindowsForBusiness/end-of-xp-support  

Basically that means Microsft would now no longer provide security updates and/or technical support for XP. Boom! What is there to do next? Just update your system to a newer OS they say but in the real World not everyone does what the companies says, so we kept using Windows XP, right? 

Well, that end of the support didn't only mean you would miss out on latest security updates on the Windows XP platform, but also on the programs that used those security features and updates to make it safer for you to browse the Internet, like Google Chrome. Google Chrome did manage to keep the support up for the browser for nearly 2 years, but the time has come, they can't keep the updates up any longer without the security updates from the vendor. 

What About Windows Vista

Microsoft hasn't apparently ended support for Windows Vista and would be doing that until 2017, but due to a very small user base Google decided to end the support for Windows Vista too. 

That's it, people tend to hate the flop platform. It's the Jar Jar Binks of Operating System, lousy and hated.

What If I don't Update?

I thought why would it be difficult for people to upgrade to even Windows 7 on their systems, and one of my Google+ post on the topic gave me some interesting and legitimate answers. Many of the older systems didn't support new OS like Windows 7/8.1/10, or either it was not a viable option for many people who just want to work and did not want the hassles of managing their systems. 

You can still use Chrome

The notification about the support ending didn't mean to force you to upgrade to a newer OS or was a team plan by the companies to have you buy them. As Microsoft ended support, it was obvious that programs that runs under that platform too would stop the update in the near future and with a program that keeps the updates coming at a regular rate like Chrome it was even more obvious. 

Though it is prompting you to upgrade to a new platform for future updates, it doesn't mean Chrome would stop working on your PC. Things would work just as fine as it used to, what you will miss would be security and feature updates from Chrome. For a web browser security is one of the major part of their infrastructure, no one wants their sensitive information to be stolen, and therefore it is recommended to upgrade. 

I use a good Anti-virus software, wouldn't that secure me?

"Without critical Windows XP security updates, your PC may become vulnerable to harmful viruses, spyware, and other malicious software which can steal or damage your business data and information. Anti-virus software will also not be able to fully protect you once Windows XP itself is unsupported."  - Microsoft official release page

Though that doesn't mean vulnerabilities and viruses would be coming all  your way, but that imposes a significant risk. If you keep using it, you are keeping like a a gold brick in the open air, until someone sees it everything is fine. 

What About Switching to Firefox Or Some Other Browser?

The major options are Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Opera itself is built over the Chromium source code, so its fate is the same the Chrome's. 

The one left is Mozilla Firefox, it is sure beautiful browser developed by the open-source organization Mozilla. There's a few things you must know before the decision of switching to Firefox on Windows XP.

• The current version of Firefox stable release is 44, note that after the version 12 Firefox doesn't work on Windows XP SP2 and prior. You need to upgrade to Service Pack 3.
• As it progresses it would become obvious to end the support for the SP3 too, and would ultimately require you to upgrade to a newer OS to keep using it too.
• If you don't upgrade, you will still be able to use the last supported version, but that would, again impose security risk.

Upgrading OS Problems and Solutions

In the Google+ post mentioned above, people came up with legitimate reasons why they do not want to upgrade to a newer version of the OS. 

1. Hardware wouldn't support Windows 7 or later. 
2. Budget not in the support of upgrading to a new Operating System like Windows 7/8.1/10
3. Not tech-savvy so upgrading to a new OS is not a great thing to start the day with.
4. I love Windows XP <3

Answers to these questions (opinion based):

1. Apparently Windows 7, or even 8 and 8.1 doesn't take much advanced hardware to run. I have been using Windows 7 on a 6 year old computer that came with the hardware cost me $500. You have to analyze to see what more would you need to upgrade with your hardware to be able to run Windows 7 or later. See this page to know the system requirements for Windows 7
   
   Or if that's not that option then see the other solutions.
2. Use Linux based operating system. Open Source, free and well-managed. Ubuntu is what I use and one of the most used distribution of Linux. 
3. In this age there are quite many technical experts almost in every locality on the planet, see if you can find one, ask your friends, families, the chances are high that you may find a tech expert among your own relatives!
4. Well, love for Windows XP is just phenomenal, I have seen people not upgrading to a new OS even if they can just because they love XP. If that's the case then nothing can be done instead of deciding to move on. As said earlier you can keep using Chrome, well only updates wouldn't come your way in the future. Full stop. 

There are many malicious activities carried on by people taking this situation as an opportunity to exploit the general users, I suggest you to not fall for those, before trying anything to help you with this do check the official documents and Google Chrome help forums to make sure it is not malicious. 

Thanks for reading. Drop your opinions in the comments, we would love to hear from you!

Disclaimer: We are not affiliated with Google, Apple or Microsoft in any ways and do not intend to market their products through this post. 

How to Open Developer Tools in Different Browsers

Developer tools or shortened DevTools are set of tools used for debugging web pages which is important tool for web developers and also general users who wants to inspect a page, make changes to the site on the front-end or analyse network usage by the webpage.

It is a all-in-one tool for a person who wants to learn what happening behind the scenes of a website. If you are new to it you may want to learn about, I wrote a post about using Chrome Developer Tools but if you need a more brief information about it see this
https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/

Chrome and Safari's developer tools are very much the same. But Mozilla Firefox has it's own unique developer tool set but using it is almost same as using any other developer tool.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome in my opinion is the best browser for web debugging using DevTools. DevTools are frequently updated and are simple to use.

Starting DevTools on Chrome

Starting DevTools on any webpage is very easy. There are three ways to open the console :

1. Select the Chrome Menu  > Tools > Developer Tools

2. Right click on a blank area of the page and from the list of options click on "Inspect Element" at the bottom. To inspect a particular element right click on the element and then select the inspect element option.

3. Another way to open the console is keyboard shortcut. Press Ctrl+Shift+I (Cmd+Shift+I on Mac) and the developer tools will appear.

Starting JavaScript Console in DevTools

JavaScript Console is used to run JavaScript codes on a page. It's often used to test scripts on a website to check if the code works well or not. But you can use it as a calculator or just try out JavaScript functions using it.
To directly open the JavaScript Console select the Chrome Menu  > Tools > JavaScript console or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+J (Cmd+Shift+J on Mac).

When the Developer Tool is opened select the "Console" tab on top to switch to JavaScript console.

Mozilla Firefox

If you are using Firefox make sure you have the latest version, as older versions don't include developer tools or if they do, they are old. Developer tools of new Firefox is way better than the older version and got some extra tools too.

Starting Developer Tools on Firefox

You can it by various ways. The most common way is to open it using Inspect Element option. Right click on a blank area on the web page and from the list options select "Inspect Element", the Firefox Developers tools will open.

Or if you can open it by going to the Tools menu > Web Developer > Inspector, this will open the developer tool in page inspector mode.

Opening JavaScript Console

Accessing JavaScript console in Firefox is similar to opening the page inspector. Open the Developer tools by right clicking on a blank area and then selecting the Inspect Element option. Now just switch to the "Console" tag on top of the dev. tools.

Or you can also open it through the tools menu. Click on Tools > Web Developer > Web Console or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+K.

Apple Safari

Accessing developer tools on Safari is similar to as in Chrome. Some keyboards shortcuts might be different. Simply right click anywhere on the page and press Inspect element.

If you have any question ask it in the comments.  

Disable right click without using JavaScripts

Disabling right click on websites and blogs are very popular nowadays just to ensure that no one can copy content from their website.
Using JavaScripts provided by many websites on blog or website to protect content from being copied is very popular. JavaScripts can be of different types depending on it's author, they can put whatever they want and block right click on webpages.
But JavaScripts have it's own bad effect on blogs, because most the JavaScripts provided to disable right click on webpages sends out an alert message whenever someone right clicks and it is irritating. And JavaScripts can be easily bypassed and allow the right click.
So what you want is a hassle free way to stop peoples from right clicking on your page and copy your contents.

One benefit of having right click disabled is that you can stop most visitor from copying your contents, but there can be some people knowing ways to bypass it, but hope you don't have such visitors who will copy your content.

The real trick

Almost everywhere you will see tricks to disable right click using JavaScript, but if the user disables JavaScript they can easily use right click on your website without any difficulties. JavaScript is not an ideal way to do it.
We have got a new way to disable right click without any implementation of JavaScripts that can slow down your page. I came to knew about this while I was in a net banking site, just used the chrome developer tool tools to inspect what they used to disable right click and found it.
It was a small attribute in the body tag of the document. So follow the steps to do it on Blogger, this can implemented on any website, just find your main HTML and add this attribute in the <body> tag.

Demo

For Blogger Users - 

1. Go to Blogger Dashboard
2. Select Template tab
3. Click on Edit HTML > Proceed

Now click CTRL+F and find enter this <body into the search box, you will find something similar to this



The <body> tag is just below the ending </head> tag. Now when you find it, copy this small code snippet or a short code word.

oncontextmenu="return false;"

When copied, go back to the Edit HTML of your Blog and paste this after <body with a space in between. So it must look something like this


Once you have added the attribute in the body tag refresh your blog with CTRL+F5 and try to right click, now you have right click disabled on your blog/website ! Great, people can't copy your content.

Negative points in using JavaScript for this ?

You can rank JavaScript 2nd to play the trick of disabling right click on a website but there are some negative points of JavaScript. Read those below

• Most JavaScripts uses alert message which can annoy regular users
• If the page load is interrupted when the page is loading then JavaScript don't work which will result in letting others copy your contents with right click.
• Those who want to copy the content they can disable JavaScript in their browser and they can copy the content again. 
• JavaScript slows down the page loading speed 

So, these were some negative points of using JavaScript to disable right click, simply use the small attribute to make it work like the JavaScript does.

Will it completely disallow the user to copy contents ?

You must accept the bitter truth that there's no technique which can keep everyone from copying contents or pictures from a site. They can use many ways to do this, but if you don't have some wicked minded people on your blog then it's guaranteed that your content will be less copied from your site. Using this trick is better than not using it.

• Additionally you may also disable text and image selection on your page for better protection - Click to know about it

Your feedback

As always your opinions and feedback is important for us because you are the one who makes our post more valuable and worth reading. Drop your comments to express your thought on this tutorial.

How to use Chrome developer tools

Chrome is the best browser for any web developer like me, it's just all i want to discover new things online such as new designs and techniques to make the web better. So, today i will give some basic tips on using Chrome developer tools to understand your own website/blog structure better.
In most of the tutorial for blogger, it's straight that the selectors will be the same in all classic blogger templates and that CSS or JQuery can be used globally on any blogger blog and that might work well.

But when you are using a custom template for your blog or website then you don't know what selector to put the CSS or JQuery and that's frustrating, but ever wondered how we know what selector you must use on your blog for a particular CSS or JQuery ? Now it's clear that you know, it's Chrome developer Tools.

Chrome developer tool is one in all complete tool to understand the structure of a page and see the complete HTML. You also get to see what files are loaded with the site load and also you can monitor the network condition and how files are loaded. That's why i love using the Developer tools. Here is how it looks (opened for blog page)

Whenever you open it you will see some beautiful codes and i just love it !

How to open it ?

When you want to experience better web developing with Developer tools then always use Chrome, browsers like Firefox also have their own developer tools inbuilt but not too effective.


To access the developer tools in chrome, find a blank space or an element in the webpage and right click on it, you will see 'Inspect Element' in the menu (usually at bottom), click on it and you will get your developer tool opened. Now you will get the first feeling of a web developer.

Using it 

You can't make use of the developer tools if you don't have any plan regarding it. But yet you can look at the structure of a website to know more about it. It's more than just source code of the website, you can edit the website by changing the HTML markup on the elements page and the changes are made in real time but the changes are only for you, editing the HTML markup doesn't mean that the changes will be made for everyone viewing the website. Not only HTML, but you can also apply CSS and JavaScript on site, it's useful for testing a code before you apply it on your web page. 

Elements

Elements tab shows you the elements of the webpage your inspecting in HTML and on right sidebar you will see the matched CSS rules on the element you are inspecting. You can edit the HTML by right clicking on the HTML markup and edit HTML or double any HTML line to change it.

Resources

This the best place for me, because i can test my developed CSS code without bothering to apply it on the web page and then test. Actually the resource tab is for seeing the files externally with the website, such as JavaScript, CSS, Fonts and images files which you can call resource for the website.



You can see that i am editing a CSS file in my website and that's how i test new CSS. If the website you are inspecting have a stylesheet file then you can edit it freely or add new CSS to it to test a CSS before you apply it.


Similar to the CSS file you can see JS, Fonts and images files too.  

Network

As the name suggest, it's related to network. It shows you how your browser loaded the content and is the condition ok. I don't use it much but it's help for people who really need help with their network monitoring.

More other tabs

There are more other useful tabs in the chrome developer tool, which is very useful when you want it. You can discover more with the developer tool and even if you aren't a tech savvy person you can learn the basics of web development yourself and then basic is all you need to get to the next level.

Your feedback ?

This post was written to help people inspect their websites for better and fast development. Your feedback is important for us to improve our content and know more about how are we doing. You may drop your previous advice and thought in the comments. 

Blogger Page Title doesn't show correctly for Dynamic templates in Firefox

Blogger's blog are facing problem to show the accurate Page Title on Firefox tab, instead of showing the Page Title, it's shows the Url

Blogger Blogs with Dynamic template aren't showing page title on Tab of Firefox, every blog with Dynamic template is affected and when opened in Firefox, it doesn't shows the Page title on tab, but shows the full Blog Address.


I am not sure what's causing it, is it the Firefox or the Blogger ?  But this is really annoying, however it shows the Page title for post pages well but creates problem with Home page.

I am trying my best to figure it out what's the exact problem, i will update this post after i have some updates about this problem, hope Blogger will also try to fix this problem. I hope someone from Google sees my post and do something about this.


If you have any idea about this please reply in comments. 

This is tested with Latest version of Firefox (11) and still the problem occurs. Someone need to fix it as soon as possible, i am trying my best.