browser support

[Michiel de Jong]

as we're slowly getting more and more serious about this whole thing (we've even started to add actual tests to our code! :), let's now talk about browser support. Basically what we need is localStorage to do client-side apps, and cors to do remoteStorage user accounts. According to http://caniuse.com/#search=cors and http://caniuse.com/#search=localStorage the bottleneck is cors for all browsers. This means we have:

Firefox, Chrome, Safari: fully supported. We'll also test all our code in each of these before we put it live, or at least when we make significant changes to anything.

Firefox-mobile, Android-Native, Safari-iOS: all support cors, and we should start from now on to test our code on each of these whenever we do major releases.

IE10, Opera12, Opera-mobile12: these will support cors, so we should add these to our list of browser to test when they come out

IE8, IE9: we're not currently supporting them, and that's a shame because that makes our compatibility drop from 86% ('good enough') to 58% ('a problem').

This may sound silly, but there are very few people i know who have access to internet explorer. Most web hackers i know either use a macbook, or run linux, or both. :) Is there any IE enthusiast out there who would be willing to look into making https://github.com/unhosted/remoteStorage.js compatible with the XDomainRequest object?


Cheers!
Michiel

[nil]

There is IEs4linux[1], but I can't find anything about IE9, except a
note[2] from one year ago, that they were adding it to the package.
Can't test right now though, as it needs wine and wine for Debian
wheezy has suddenly vanished.

[2]: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/news/55

>
> Cheers!
> Michiel

[Jon Spriggs]

A friend of mine works (or used to at least) closely with Microsoft. He's asked me to get you to mail him, but I'm waiting on his preferred e-mail address to forward to you Michiel.

I'm not sure he'll want to get involved on a regular basis, but at least it's a starting point!
--
Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs

[Michiel de Jong]

great, thank you!

on a side note, i would love to see the face of myself of 10 years ago, reading this thread. I'm sure that 10 years from now we're talking about finding someone who has access to an OStatus-port of facebook, or a DuckDuckGo-port of Google search. :)

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org> wrote:

IE8, IE9: we're not currently supporting them, and that's a shame because that makes our compatibility drop from 86% ('good enough') to 58% ('a problem').

I looked into this, and reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288060%28VS.85%29.aspx is looks like there are two restrictions that pose a problem to us:
- PUT, DELETE and PROPFIND verbs are not supported
- there is no way to distinguish a 404 from for instance a 500.
- there is apparently no way to send request headers or credentials

This means we have to set up a proxy, and do browser<->proxy<->server for IE8 and IE9. We can run such a proxy for people who don't want to run one themselves, and publish the source code for people who do.

Running a pretty much open proxy is not much fun, and it's hard to see how we could rate-limit it properly while still allowing all legitimate traffic through. Does anyone have ideas on how we could do that?

A lot of users don't have permissions to install Firefox on the computer they use. And even though IE10 fixes the problem, it will only be released on Windows 8, and not on Windows XP, Windows Vista, or even Windows 7.

We could change the spec to make it work with XDomainRequest of course, but that would mean we get a very strange api that is not compatible with the existing REST apis we support now (CouchDB, WebDAV).

Maybe Flash can do cross-domain http requests? Does anybody know? Most instances of IE8 and IE9 probably have Flash installed.


Cheers!
Michiel

[Matt Crinklaw]

On Monday, March 12, 2012 8:29:30 AM UTC-4, Michiel de Jong wrote:

Maybe Flash can do cross-domain http requests? Does anybody know? Most instances of IE8 and IE9 probably have Flash installed.

Not sure if you have already seen this or not but Flash XHR claims to be a "drop-in" replacement for XMLHTTPRequest to allow cross domain requests.

https://github.com/flensed/flXHR

[Michiel de Jong]

ah cool, thanks! not sure if we want to require storage providers to
provide a /crossdomain.xml file or still combine this with a proxy.
but it's definitely worth looking into.