Improvements in Web Browser Compatibility
Hi folks, my name is Troy Starr, and I'm a tester on the Windows SharePoint Services team. One of the areas I work on is web browser support. Since releasing Beta 2 of Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Office SharePoint Server 2007, we've received many questions about our web browser support in the new version. It's great to hear that we're getting so much interest this early because we've been focused on improving this area ever since we started planning the new version. If you've attended our preview presentations and events, you know how excited we are to share these plans with you.
Before we talk about where we're going, let's have a quick flashback on where we were. Our previous versions were primarily deployed in intranet scenarios such as internal collaboration sites and internal portals. End users typically all used the same corporate-approved web browser such as our Internet Explorer, and we added support for additional third party browsers such as Netscape in the 2003 version as well as Mozilla and Firefox over time via subsequent Service Packs.
When planning for the upcoming 2007 version, we knew that our new features such as wikis, blogs, and RSS would make us very attractive for Internet facing sites. And the extensibility we provide meant that many other server products could be built on top of SharePoint and serve a diverse user base. These users could be using a variety of web browsers, so we decided to bring key representatives from all of the SharePoint Products and Technologies teams together to form a "virtual team" to plan our web browser support. We studied web browser market share data, reviewed the customer feedback we had received for our previous versions, and came up with a vision for what our web browser support story should look like. We then used this virtual team to coordinate our testing and documentation efforts around that vision. To reduce the chance of introducing browser-specific bugs, the SharePoint Products and Technologies teams have been following the basic WSS V3 UI where possible.
We decided to divide our web browser support into 2 levels. Level 1 web browsers will have the optimal SharePoint experience as they can take advantage of advanced features such as ActiveX controls. They will be supported for all SharePoint functionality including the Central Administration site. The Level 1 web browsers are Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 for Windows.
Level 2 web browsers support all of our basic functionality so that users can both read and write in our content sites, perform site administration, etc. Some functionality may not be available, some functionality may be available in a more limited form, and some visual rendering may not be as optimized as our Level 1 browsers. We also will not support Level 2 web browsers on the Central Administration site.
An example of functionality that isn't available for Level 2 browsers is ActiveX controls -- that technology is only supported by IE. There may also be other features that are only available to Level 1 browsers. An example of functionality that is available in a more limited form would be our "rich text" fields. In our current release, SharePoint provides a rich text editor with an easy to use rich text toolbar. To do so, we took advantage of some IE-specific functionality available at the time. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find room in our schedule for the new version to convert our rich text toolbar to use a more cross-browser compatible technology. So instead, we're letting end users type in "safe" HTML tags in the rich text fields to achieve the same rich text effects.
The good news here is that we have significantly improved SharePoint's cross-browser support in the new release compared to the current 2003 release. We've also been documenting where our features behave differently in Level 2 browsers, so customers can better understand what to expect when we release the new version. While subject to change before we ship, the current Level 2 web browsers are:
Windows
-
Firefox 1.5+
-
Netscape 8.1+
-
Mozilla 1.7+
Macintosh
Unix/Linux
-
Firefox 1.5+
-
Netscape 7.2+
Please note that the following web browsers, which were supported in previous versions of SharePoint Products and Technologies, will not be supported in the new version:
Here are some of the improvements that we have made in our Level 2 browser support compared to the previous version:
-
Most context menus are now supported in non-IE browsers. You'll notice that we've heavily integrated context menus into SharePoint with this version. These are the menus that appear when you hover over list items and click on the menu triangle, as well as list toolbars, view selectors, etc. By adding non-IE support to most of our context menus, not only will end users have a better experience interacting with SharePoint sites, but developers will benefit too. Now they can take advantage of the extensibility we offer in those menus and not have to worry about providing a separate code path for non-IE users.
-
Creating file attachments to list items is now supported in non-IE browsers. This was a popular request from previous versions, so we've extended that support beyond just Internet Explorer.
The best part of our improved web browser support is that you can start using it right now. Simply download and install Beta 2 (from http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx) and start using your favorite features in any of the browsers listed above. Our Beta testers have already given us much feedback on browser support in Beta 2, and we've been using that to fix bugs and improve our compatibility. You can expect our next milestone build (Beta 2 Technical Refresh) to provide even better web browser support.
Troy Starr, SDE/T for Windows SharePoint Services
