Thursday, July 5, 2012

Opera and Blogger compatibility issue: get rid of the warning message

If you are using Opera and Blogger (Blogspot), you may have noticed recently the warning message: "Your browser is no longer supported by Blogger. Some parts of Blogger will not work and you may experience problems. If you are having problems, try Google Chrome. | Dismiss."


The warning message in itself is fine. It simply warns you that some parts of Blogger may not work as intended. But, how to get rid of this message? You can dismiss it but it will appear again and again until you give up and download google chrome... Unless... Here is a simple trick to make the message disappear. Warning: you will then have problems editing your posts (viewing them, checking the stats, etc... will still be fine).

Principle of the work-around:
Blogger knows you use Opera because your browser tells him so. What if your Opera browser were to tell blogger "hi, I am Internet Explorer" or "hi, I am Firefox"? Then you won't get the error message anymore. Well, some parts of blogger will still fail (posts editing), but at least, you won't get this annoying warning message anymore. In the IT world, we call the identity of your browser the "user agent". It is a known fact that you can change it to more or less whatever you want and the good thing with Opera is that you can do it for a specific website and don't need to change your register for that.

Work-around, step-by-step:
1) Go to blogger.com (or actually any websites you have problems with, it can be adsense in the future for example)

2) Right click on the page (around the middle of the page should be fine)

3) Select "Edit site preferences"


4) Verify that the site address is correct (for example, if you wanted to change the behaviour of Adsense, put "www.google.com/adsense" instead of just "www.google.com"). Here, "www.blogger.com" is the correct address.


5) Go to the tab Network


6) Change the Browser identification parameter. You can ask Opera to identifies itself as Internet Explorer for example or  Firefox. "Identify as Internet Explorer" is the one I use to get rid of the warning message. When I want to edit my posts, I get back to "Identify as Opera" (message editing is then working fine but the warning message comes back).

The good thing about this fix is that it only concerns the website you have problems with. It will not change anything to your normal surfing experience in general. The bad thing is that you will experience problems with Blogger, especially with posts editing... Oh well, at least, you were warned.

Thanks in advance for everyone giving a +1 to this article (google button above)

4 comments:

  1. why google blogger didn't support opera?

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    Replies
    1. It did but they just stopped a few days ago. Maybe too much work to test their services with every browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera,...) on every devices (windows PC, android phones, ipad,...). It may also be a disagreement in the way to handle some web parameters, etc...

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  2. No, they're still doing it. I just installed Opera about a week ago. The message I get from Blogger is that I'm logged out from another location. Do I want to log in again, yes or close. If I click yes, the message repeats. If I click close it never loads.

    I tried this and id'ed my browser as Firefox, but the problem remains. Any suggestions? I did check my other 2 browsers to make sure they were signed in to blogger. No joy. I'm using Ubuntu Linux as well; could that be part of the problem?

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    Replies
    1. Hmmm, I am logging in and out from several locations, several browsers and I never had this specific issue, so I can unfortunately not say much more about it. I don't think it is related to the problem I describe here and I don't think it is due to Linux, but it could be. Good luck solving it.

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