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Where new feature ideas and current bugs for the Hypothesis product live
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Warn users of unsupported browsers #1141

Closed klemay closed 3 years ago

klemay commented 4 years ago

We have a KB article stating:

The Hypothesis Chrome extension, Bookmarklet, and LMS application work within any modern web browser (a version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, or equivalent released within the last 12 months). Note that as of 1 July 2020, Hypothesis will no longer support Internet Explorer.

A common issue we've seen in the support inbox, specifically for LMS users, is that students on old browsers like IE11 will see the Hypothesis sidebar load normally, but the PDF shows up as blank (screenshot below). When the student tries a different browser, it works the way it should. We don't find out about this until the student emails the teacher to say they can't see the assigned reading, and the instructor relays that info to us.

We could save our students, teachers, and support staff a lot of headaches if we showed a warning to users of unsupported browsers when they launch a Hypothesis assignment.

Here's an example of what a student on IE11 might see [please note that black boxes over usernames were added by me to protect student privacy - the black box where the PDF should be is what the student sees]: old-browser

robertknight commented 3 years ago

The screenshot shown in the description here looks like legacy Edge to me.

klemay commented 3 years ago

Very possible the user mis-reported their browser. Will dig through support tickets to find a true IE11 one.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 12:00 PM Robert Knight notifications@github.com wrote:

The screenshot shown in the description here looks like legacy Edge to me.

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/1141#issuecomment-714593136, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AC4HDGOWTFOCJORJDPRKJQTSMBJI3ANCNFSM4R6IWD2Q .

-- Katelyn Lemay (pronouns: she/her https://www.mypronouns.org/she-her) Product Manager, Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/ Black Lives Matter https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/.

klemay commented 3 years ago

Here's an IE11 screenshot (taken before the changes implemented this sprint)

image (1)

robertknight commented 3 years ago

Hi @klemay - That screenshot looks a lot like Microsoft Edge (Legacy) to me. IE 11 looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11#/media/File:Internet_Explorer_11_screenshot.png

The current expectation for Edge Legacy is that versions 17 and 18 are supported, and if there are any problems that is a bug that we'll fix, but earlier versions (16 and below) are not.

It is still planned that we will show some kind of banner or notice in the unsupported versions of Edge, as well as IE 11 or Safari <= 9 or an old version of Firefox or Chrome. I'm currently working out the details of that in the LMS context.

robertknight commented 3 years ago

Related to this, I posted in Slack earlier some statistics about which browser engines were used in LTI launches over 24 hours yesterday: https://hypothes-is.slack.com/archives/C4K6M7P5E/p1603801318245200. As expected the vast majority of users are using one of the 3 most recent versions of a Chrome (Blink), Safari (WebKit) or Firefox-based browser. There is a tail of older versions though.

robertknight commented 3 years ago

The main part of this is done now. In unsupported browsers an advisory notice will be displayed on startup:

lms-warning-banner

The presence of this banner does not prevent the application from attempting to start, but it tells the user that Hypothesis will probably not work and that they'll need to upgrade. False positives are possible due to us testing for APIs differently than how the application actually uses them, but unlikely.