As the sole developer at my company, I'm really tired of supporting older browsers (mostly IE). I'd like to display a nice message to the user that lets them know they're using a deprecated browser, that things may not work quite right and instructions on how to upgrade. Is there a hosted JS widget I might be able to include in the page that would accomplish this?
I'm not against making my own, just thought it may be nice to use an existing service if such a thing exists.
(Out of roughly 10k uniques a month, 5% use IE 7 or below.
Sounds like you might want to try something like this: http://browser-update.org/
Related
I'm thinking if it's a good idea to have a Web app which doesn't require a site login. This is for something like a public wiki where you just want to jump in and create stuff but still have a way to control access.
Content can be read/edited by the content creator (or a few other people).
What would be good references or existing apps that implement something like this?
EDIT: The closest similar "no signup" site I could find was ImageShack though there you can't edit what you've already submitted.
I'm not too sure on the value of this type of a system. Once the password/key has been in circulation for x time, they will be rendered useless.
I recommend rather going for something that's more scalable and open, with a good example being OpenID. Here's a good library of implementations for it as well.
Very random and annoying problem with IE6. We keep our common JS files on a resources server so we only have to update them in one place. As well as our custom classes we also keep our build of mootools and more on the resources server and link to it in the head of our sites.
This is fine in all the browsers accept IE6. In IE6 it seems to not loads the core quick enough from the external link before trying to process the mootools code in my site.js file. It will go wrong on the first line "windows.addEvent".
If i put a mootools core in a folder where the site is though its fine. Does anyone know why it might be doing this and if so a way around it, but still keeping the files on the resources domain?
Thanks
Tom
#neil . Yeah exactly. Quite frankly i didn't want to be rude but the first two responses were a waste of their time and mine. Someone correcting a typo and someone else saying not to bother supporting a browser that still has 9% share of the market, quite brilliant.
#Dimitar Thanks for your response. I can't change the event to load unless you mean in native JS because no mootools will work. I don't like mixing the native JS when i'm using a framework if i can help it. Never heard of "defer" though, i will def try that. Thanks for your help.
IE6 probably pipelines the download as an extra host gives it the ability to do it in parallel.
perhaps you can either try adding defer='defer' for IE6 for your chunk of code that relies on mootools or change the event from domready to load instead (also for IE) (I tend to use the latter)
I know that there are even some web-resources exist which allow you to get a preview of a web-site 'as it looks in a certain browser'.
I only need view from any browser as an image. Is it possible to get that image without people involvement? Can I get it without system programming, just by means of pure java/python/asp.net?
UPD: http://browsershots.org/ is an example of described web-resources.
The tools I know of that does this - really "just" launches a browser (programatically of course) and takes a screenshot of the contents of the browser and saves this in an image.
I think no matter what you do, you will have to find a way of doing something like this. If you by system programming are refering to OS API calls, then I think you will be out of luck. You might be able to get a third party library that can do this for you, but then that library will simply be making those system calls instead.
I see now others have posted links to places that might prove themself useful to you as well. Without having looked at the links, that would probably be the easiest and best way to go.
Good luck
I believe what you're looking for is browsershots
There are some websites that let you do this.
Try BrowserShots
PageGlimpse is a service
providing developers with programatic
access to thumbnails of any web page.
It has API based on REST protocol and some documentation.
You have a lot of things doing this for you. Take a look at stw for instance.
If you're using .NET, it is possible to do this using the DrawToBitmap method of the WebBrowser control (example here). However, as you'll see by the last comment on that example page, it doesn't work with Flash, and it's a bit 'temperamental' with sites that use complex Javascript for rendering.
I think your best bet is to do as others have said and use a third party thumbnail provider. I haven't used it, but http://www.thumbshots.com/ looks good.
What is a (free) technology which requires the least amount of code for creating a website with the following requirements:
Sign-up/login
Form for adding your personal info. which gets databased
Each person can view and edit their own info
Admin can view and edit any
The form needs to be easily customizable and extensible (by the website's owner, not during run-time)
Is there a beginner tutorial for such a thing?
(For me, this question is about a friend who wants me to do this, but I want him to do it himself so I don't have to get roped into maintenance. I also want to keep it more general for the sake of Stack Overflow and future readers.)
Edit: I thought I remembered some ASP.NET tutorials that were mostly drag/drop or things where it was all but made for you from the database schema (which can be made with SSMS's GUI) but I can't seem to find them now.
Responding to posts below requesting specifics: this site will be for potential clients to sign-up and enter their company's info and fill out a form about their advertising needs.
I thought about putting this on SU instead, but since there was likely going to be some coding involved (I assumed no-code was an unreachable goal) SO seemed more appropriate.
Your friend can consider a framework like drupal. It has a bit of a learning code but, you can create a website with everything you ask for without code. You may want to modify it to change the look but there are themes for that.
Also, some hosts like godaddy.com have this installed and you do not have to worry about the complex installation procedures. Just start modifying the content of the site, select a built in template and go...
PhpBB? I think you need to specify what the website is going to be used for before you can get better/more specific answers.
... have a look at Drupal or Joomla, expect a learning curve nevertheless.
Is this friend a programmer as well? If so, I'd suggest building such a site using a PHP framework. Deploying an existing forum/wiki is also an option of course, but will probably have much more features than you describe. But if s/he's not a programmer, I don't see how s/he will be able to develop a site like that in a reasonable amount of time.
Why not using a CMS like wordpress, drupal and co. ?
I want to display a message to users with unsupported browsers, as opposed to having the site fail in an ugly manner.
What's the best way to do that?
GWT also provides browser detection using the .gwt.xml file. Have a look at this:
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-doc-1-5/wiki/DevGuideDeferredBindingReplacement
It's an interesting solution, but I'm not sure if it's the best solution in your case. It could be very useful for creating a simplified version of your application which would automatically be loaded in unsupported browsers.
The GWT team does not provide a list of unsupported browsers, only supported browsers, and it's a vague list at that "most recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. (Opera, too, most of the time.)".
If you have a good idea yourself of what browser/version won't work you can use this code:
public static native String getUserAgent() /*-{
return navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
}-*/
to learn what browser is being used and perhaps cook up a work-around.
On the other hand, browser rendering of web pages can fail in many subtle ways ranging from mildly annoying to catastrophic, and there is often no way to know where your page falls on that scale. One of the major reasons for GWT is that you can stop worrying about this sort of thing. At least until it happens.
If you want to make it simple and stupid, check with some javascript code in your main html file, before GWT is loaded. Novertheless, I would rather trust GWT to handle things more or less quirky. You could also just recommend chrome or firefox.
I realise this is an old question, but I had the same problem, and wanted to share a new solution for it.
Today with GWT2.7 "obsolete" browsers try to download undefined.cache.js. This obviously fails and the client is stuck forever.
You could patch GWT itself setting fallback compile steps, but the easy solution is to simply provide a (manually crafted) undefined.cache.js and place it where the other generated files are.
Inside you put this one line:
xxxxxxx.onScriptDownloaded(alert('This browser is not supported anymore.\nPlease upgrade to a more recent browser.'));
where xxxxxxx is your module basename (from xxxxxxxx.gwt.xml).