What have website change that having issues with Xp & issue with user agent?

Topic

New Reply

I am old and poor. I do not have money get a new computer.

I have been using Xp and user agent for years now. All sites worked fine.

Recently about a week ago or so, several of my sites are having issues. My news website for ABC does not load the video. My moives site does not work. Other sites do not load the site correctly (IE missing images or toolbars or text). I changed the user agent to say that it is Firefox on Windows 11:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0

I even tried as Chrome:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Has any other older timers with Windows XP encounter issues? What have you done to solve them.

Thank you.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Old timer wrote:

I have been using Xp and user agent for years now. All sites worked fine. Recently about a week ago or so, several of my sites are having issues. My news website for ABC does not load the video. My moives site does not work.

I’m honestly astounded things have been working for this long. I would have expected things to have stopped working by at least 5 years ago, if not longer.

Changing your User Agent string simply lies to a website about what OS version and browser version you’re using so they won’t nag you, but it does nothing to change the capabilities of the underlying browser you’re using. You don’t say what browser that is, but I’m going to guess Internet Explorer 8.

Most modern websites, including probably anything that streams video, is going to require support for HTML5 and HTML5’s “video” tag. IE8 did not support HTML5. No matter what your User Agent string is letting you pretend to be, your IE8 is probably incapable of understanding the HTML5 commands the website may be sending — and the website will be speaking in HTML5 because your User Agent string said you’re using a modern, HTML5-compliant browser. It’s a bit like telling someone, “Yeah, I speak French,” when you really don’t, and then when they start rattling on in French you don’t understand a word of what they’re saying.

Even if you’re using Chrome or Firefox, the only versions that will install on XP are themselves so old that, like IE8, they also won’t be HTML5-compliant.

The fact things have worked this long suggests the websites in question may have previously been using code to detect non-HTML5 browsers and, if detected, falling back to more complicated, old-style HTML4 coding. If that’s what they have been doing, it wouldn’t be surprising if they eventually decided to drop that complicated code from their webpages, on the assumption that in this day and age, a decade after implementation, surely nobody would be using a non-HTML5 browser.

Upgrading to a more modern Windows version (so you can use a more modern browser version) may require more modern hardware, which you’ve indicated is out of your budget. In that case, you may want to explore if installing linux instead of Windows is an option. Linux typically supports old hardware longer than Microsoft does. You might be able to install a recent enough version of linux that will allow you to install a more recent, HTML5-compliant browser.

If linux is beyond your capabilities, then start searching for free or low cost cast-offs that may not be exactly modern but at least more modern than what you’ve got. At least around where I live, I know I’ve occasionally seen free Win7 and even Win10 refurbs on sites like freecycle.com and Craigslist.

1 user thanked author for this post.

SueW

Reply | Quote

I haven’t used XP in quite a while… so this is a bit of a shot in the dark — does the web browser you’re support TLS 1.3?

Reply | Quote

Here’s a link to a google search “free computers for low income seniors”. Hopefully you’ll be able to access it. There are lots of places to get free or inexpensive computers that are serviceable, and also help using them and getting them set up.

Regarding Linux, if you’re up to installing it, I can say from first hand experience that laptops from 2009 with 4 GB RAM and hard disk drives run the latest version of Linux Mint and the latest versions of Firefox and Opera. If you don’t feel up to installing it yourself you very likely can find someone who is and who will do it for free or a small charge. Ask around at some local computer shops. Linux Mint is an easy operating system to use and quite similar to Windows 7 and Windows XP (that’s my opinion but I stand by it).

Reply | Quote

Ooops! I said there was a link and then didn’t post it. Here it is:

https://www.google.com/search?q=free+computers+for+low+income+seniors&sca_esv=2e484b4e376f015d&source=hp&ei=QLZUZ-3yMMiCm9cPoLmayA0&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZ1TEUFzfIHUvvBqJ4Jx-ANcEe9WYLIsH&ved=0ahUKEwjtktnPxZaKAxVIweYEHaCcBtkQ4dUDCBo&uact=5&oq=free+computers+for+low+income+seniors&gs_lp=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&sclient=gws-wiz

Reply | Quote

One thing that hasn’t been talked about here is what type of Internet connection you have.  Is it Dial Up (slow), DSL over a copper telephone line (faster), or Cable or Fiber Optic (fastest).  You would have to wait a long time for videos to come through over a Dial Up connection, if they came through at all.

I agree with what DrBonzo said above about Linux Mint.  I use Linux MInt myself and find it to be a pleasant experience and easy to use especially if you’re mainly surfing the WEB.  If you are good with Windows, you can be good with Linux Mint.  It’s worth looking into.

Being 20 something in the 70's was so much better than being 70 something in the insane 20's

1 user thanked author for this post.

DrBonzo

Reply | Quote