refine config: Opening non-standard system browser in Windows at startup possible?

[Jan Peters-Anders]

Dear all,
we would like to use refine in a course that I teach at the University. The university's standard browser is Internet Explorer/Edge. Refine shall be rolled out via scripting to a wide range of computers within the domain so we were running into the problem that refine opens the Windows standard browser at startup and Internet Explorer does not support (any more) the Chrome framework which is necessary for refine, it seems. Copying the URL into Mozilla, running of refine is no problem but from the quality management point of view this is no option, since the users will see the error (Google 404) page in the IE first. So my question is: Is there maybe a configuration/command line parameter that tells refine to check if Mozilla is available and to open this browser (if available)(instead of the system standard one)? Or is there any other possibility to do this programatically (without brute forcing the Mozilla as the system standard browser)?

Sorry if this has been asked/answered before, I did not find the answer so far by googling.

Regards and thanks
Jan

[Owen Stephens]

This might be better addressed to the OpenRefine dev list - cc’d here

OpenRefine uses the Java Desktop Class[1] to trigger the browser open - it looks like this only supports opening the default browser. I suspect you’d need to modify the openBrowser method in the RefineClient class [2] with something that could open other browsers [3] - but with that I’ve hit the limit of my knowledge and ability :)

1 https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/awt/Desktop.html

2 https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/c103cdcbff49cde90409855d45f4e50b5a8349d1/server/src/com/google/refine/Refine.java

3 http://www.mkyong.com/java/open-browser-in-java-windows-or-linux/

Owen Stephens

Owen Stephens Consulting

Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: ow...@ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

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[Owen Stephens]

Oh - also just remembered this issue https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/issues/889

It looks like Tom Morris has done some work to remove the use of Chrome Frame with IE. As he notes in the issue - MS browsers don’t get the real world use that others do, but it should at least not give the error any more - this change is in 2.6rc1 and 2.6rc2 I think

Owen

Owen Stephens

Owen Stephens Consulting

Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: ow...@ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

[Thad Guidry]

Jan,

I tested MS Edge today with 2.6rc2 , everything seems to work just fine for me on Windows 7 64bit. (standard Jquery background errors are there, but doesn't hurt OpenRefine use or operations)

Thad

+ThadGuidry

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[Jan Peters-Anders]

Dear Owen, dear Thad,
thanks for responding so quickly and sending such valuable information. I will try this out coming week (I might have been using an older version for testing, but I have to check this).

Thanks again and have a nice Sunday
Jan