EREC: BSP compatibility with Firefox 10 (and above)

[george_credland]

We recently hit a compatibility issue with Firefox 10 (launched last day of January) and eRecruitment EP03 BSP pages used for the Recruiter scenarios.

This is due to class CL_BSP_ELEMENT_RT_ATTR_VALID, method BROWSER_CHECK which checks the browser versions.

It now thinks the version number is lower than the minimum supported so throws a nasty "Your browser isn't supported" error page.

A quick workaround is to apply an implcit enhancement to the start of the method. Simply "EXIT" to skip checking the versions.

SAP recently removed browser version checking from WebDynpro, but don't appear to have got around to removing it for BSP yet.

George

[Former Member]

Oss  Note 1691434 - Firefox user agent version of 'xy*.z*' parsed incorrectly

[george_credland]

Thanks for the update Renke!

I'll stick with the enhancements though as they guarantee no version checking for any browsers.

SAP removed the version checking from other products. e.g. ABAP WebDynpro and Java WebDynpro but appear to have left it in place for BSP.

At the end of the day the web pages either work o.k., work with some issues or won't work at all.

A terse message saying "Your browser is not supported" is no better than not working at all. In our experience working in a multi-browser environment it just alienates the users.

The only browser not currently working for us is Opera but that's a small percentage of people and they can at least access alternative browsers.

George

[romanweise]

Hi,

this is a problem which can probably never be solved. SAP as well as other vendors have difficulties in keeping up with the browser release cycles when it comes to external facing web applications. While companies usually take some time till they upgrade the policies for their systems (I know companies still working with IE 6) external users are usually far ahead from what is supported.

Since Firefox changed to a rapid release cycle similar to Chrome things got even worse.

All you can do is checking the sap product availability matrix for browser suppor under service.sap.com/pam to check if the browser is supported by a higher release (there is a link in the 3rd quick link block). But currently the PAM presentation still lists the support for the Firefox rapid release cycle under "planned inovation".

Rgds.

Roman

[george_credland]

Hi Roman,

Yes. I understand its not easy for SAP to keep pace with the rapid release changes.

When they do support Firefox rapid release, I'd be surprised if they back port the changes to NW 7.00.

There's still no sign of Safari working in 7.00 despite fixes being back ported to NW 7.01

It appears the version number isn't coming through correctly as it thinks version 10 is less than the

minimum supported version. If anyone actually has a very old version of Firefox that's less than the

minimum version it won't work properly for them, but we can simply ask them to upgrade. For me that's

less of a pain than blocking the newer versions and waiting for a support pack/SAP Note to fix it.

The suggested workaround is a one line ABAP implicit enhancement to the start of the method that

performs the checks to disable it. With this in place we're back up and running in production with Firefox 10/11.

George