Browser compatibility

[fazo96]

Here we discuss browser compatibility:

• what version of what browsers should we target?
• which versions of which browsers work at the moment?
• how to set up a tool to easily test multiple browsers?

Started from a discussion in another issue

[kustomzone]

Thanks. (testing on Win7) Atm, the compatibility issues center mainly around ES6 (2015) ie. unknown syntax. Fwiw, not working Maxthon (Chinese browser) Ver. 4.4.8 (core is IE11.0 + webkit.dll) Also a syntax error on FF42.

Working in Chrome 46, Opera 34, FF 45 (nightly)

Cheers!

[fazo96]

That's weird, it's working well for me on firefox 42 on arch linux.

[jbenet]

could setup a thing to take screenshots across browsers per PR. might be too much work for now

[fazo96]

Maybe other than write unit tests for the Boards API ( #3 ) we should also set up tests for the UI if it's possible, then use Karma or something to run them across browsers.

Should investigate this

[kustomzone]

"let expression support has been dropped in Gecko 41" (bug) "let blocks support has been dropped in Gecko 44" (bug)

Can I use let and const now?

"Yes. To use them on the web, you’ll have to use an ES6 compiler such as Babel, Traceur, or TypeScript. (Babel and Traceur do not support the temporal dead zone yet.)"

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/let

[fazo96]

uhm there should not be any let statements in the compiled code. @kustomzone may I ask how are you trying the app? Firefox 42 on my machine makes no complaint and runs the compiled app flawlessly. I can't understand why on my machine it doesn't complain about let (as expected, since there should be no let statements).

[kustomzone]

Ah, that could be the answer. I had problems with backslash paths (windoze), and couldn't quickly resolve where the chunks we being declared (also for some reason webpack is putting the chunk numbers on the front eg 1.app.js) so i temporarily disabled ulglify (optimize) which also speeds the build locally. And declared 1 chunk max to get it running.

[fazo96]

@kustomzone are you using windows? Maybe something in the build doesn't play nice with Windows, I haven't tried

[kustomzone]

Yes. When webpack chunks the scripts the path gets declared statically, and of course that's resolved to IPFS (why i asked about mount, thanks for explaining) so i bootstrap it by calling "dist%5Capp.js" and disabled chunking. (edited previous comment)

[fazo96]

Wow, thanks a lot for this!

It'd be great if you could manage to get it to work on windows with uglify and on linux/osx too with the same code. I'd very happily merge a PR about that :+1:

[kustomzone]

I'm also new to webpack, react, babel, but an OS check in the build process shouldn't be too hard to do. (i lost my linux laptop, so stuck on win7 pc for now)

[fazo96]

Yeah I've seen a few scripts do it :+1:

If I have the time, I'll try to set it up on windows and fix it myself, but contributions are welcome. I'll open an issue about windows support so that we can continue discussing there :+1:

[kustomzone]

Thanks. Orbit (renaming topic) has a "Requirements" section in readme. Could mention OS or browser until we've verified or resolved them. (i added it to FAQ on my branch while i test)

[fazo96]

Yeah we should add a FAQ entry about the OS and one about the Browser, also in CONTRIBUTING.md we should mention that development is happening on Linux + Chromium.

If you are comfortable with doing it, I'll gladly accept a PR, but if you're not I'll do it myself :+1:

[fazo96]

@jbenet

could setup a thing to take screenshots across browsers per PR. might be too much work for now

You mean something that opens the app in multiple browser and takes screenshots? Maybe we should have very simple tests that run in the browser: they wouldn't catch big mistakes but they would catch errors in the build and incompatible code :+1:

Related: #3 #73

[jbenet]

could hook it up to CI + ipfs.io gateway +

• https://www.browserstack.com/screenshots
• http://browsershots.org/

[fazo96]

wow thanks @jbenet! I didn't even know about those services.