Sunday, February 04, 2018

Supported browsers - update

One of my most popular posts is a collation on which browsers are actually supported for Dynamics 365 CE. This is not strange since it is a common issue, we often have customers call our support complaining that Dynamics doesn't work well, and as described in the original article, the cause is usually that they are using an unsupported browser.

Also the Micrsoft Technet article for this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/admin/supported-web-browsers-and-mobile-devices
and the detailed version: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699710.aspx mainly focuses on Edge and Internet Explorer compatibility for the different windows versions. And despite Microsoft's hopes, the rest of the world have not totally turned to all of their programs, yet.

There are currently some issues with version 9.0 as well, why I thought it might be a good idea to write a new article on which browsers are the supported one in a easily overviewable grid.

A brief explanation to the different abbreviations used in the picture:

  • SW - Supported and Working.
  • SW* - Supported and Working on OS X as designed but with somewhat limited functionality. If you compare Dynamics on OS X running Safari with it running Edge on a Win 10 you will notice that there are more options.
  • SW** - The app is not the same thing as the browser at the moment. The Unified Interface will make them almost the same. There will still be differences, in that the app will have better integrations to the device's hardware, like camera, etc. Especially for the earlier versions, the app was very limited. It is more powerful know. For field service there is also a special Field Service App which is not as HTML/JS based (it is based on Resco).
  • SW*** - I have not had the chance to test if version 9.0 works on a Nexus 10 running Chrome but the official documentation says it should work. However, as v.9.0 does not work with Chrome at the moment, (this will probably be fixed very soon) I would actually be surprised if it worked for Chrome on Nexus 10.
  • NS - Not supported. This does not mean, however, that you cannot get it to work. I have heard of people that mange to get Chrome on OS X to go into some "PC" mode which tricks Dynamics. This still doesn't make it supported, but it might work for you. The problem might be if you have any issues, that Microsoft Support could leave you hanging.
  • SNW - Supported but Not Working - As for Chrome on Windows, the general story is that Microsoft only support the latest version of it. However, despite version 9.0 official supporting Chrome on Windows, it doesn't seem to actually work. I would presume that they will fix this soon. The problem is that Dynamics 365 won't actually load.
The support matrix for the browsers is generally a tricky question. The matrix above is also simplified a bit as I have not included the parameter of the different versions of Operating systems. It can probably be presumed that Microsoft will make greater efforts into making sure that the latest and possibly even some versions before that, that they know customers are using for Edge and Internet Explorer, work well with Dynamics 365. I know some of you will probably think I am crazy for even mentioning Internet Explorer, but I have several customers who still have IE as the company standard browser, and it is not due to Dynamics 365.

As for Firefox, Chrome and Safari, these browsers might be very popular, but from a Microsoft perspective I can see a very tricky situation, and that is that they roll out changes without notifying anyone. This was, for instance, done by Google a couple of years ago when they changed their handling of modal dialogs. This caused many dialog handling features of Dynamics CRM (at that time) to break. It took some time for Microsoft to identify the change, fix it, make sure there were no regression errors, roll it through all testing scenarios and deployment stages and controlls they do until they were able to get a fix out. It did come out quite fast, but there were some people nagging at Microsoft for having a bad product, which I personally find a bit unfair.

The essence of the two paragraphs above is; feel free to use Chrome, Safari or Firefox but I would suggest always having Edge and/or IE as a backup option in the case that an update comes to the main browser that severely affects the usage of Dynamics 365.

And I hope that Microsoft soon fixes the error that stops us from using Chrome with ver. 9.0. Any day now!


Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

10 comments:

  1. Hello Gustaf,
    I cannot confirm that Chrome is not working on Windows with v9.0.
    I use the most current version 64.0 and it works fine with v9.0.
    Also the app on my Surface is working fine with v9.0.
    Best regards
    Lars

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I tried v9.0 in Chrome and have now checked both v63 and v64 and both broke for me. I run Win 10 on two different Asus laptops.

      Delete
    2. This is an interesting subject. I still get this error on my Win10 computer but was a trainer for a course last week and used a Windows Server 2012 R2 Machine with Chrome installed, and v9.0 worked great on that. So the story seems to be a bit more complex that just "not working"...

      Delete
  2. Interesting. It always breaks on my computer and on all of my colleagues computers. I am running 63.0.3239.132 which is a slightly older version on this machine, not exactly sure which one it is on the others.
    Yes, you are right, I missed adding a column for the app on windows. I will see if I can get that fixed. It has been around a while as well.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The problem with Chrome (and theoretically with Firefox, but not in practise) is every 2 weeks people get a new version. So even if MS tunes up its products for Chrome, 2 weeks after releasing it it can get broken in Chrome.
    However in our company we use Chrome as it's the fastest browser for MS Dynamics CRM - Firefox has some bugs for few our customizations in CRM (could be workaroundable with some programming) and Edge sometimes doesn't properly do the Back operation (I expect it doesn't send all the needed cookies so CRM doesn't know what previous opened record to show). IE is very slow in CRM and many of our heavy customizations with tons of JavaScripts don't work there (because nobody will make a special codepath for IE nowadays, when one codepath is enough to cover Edge/Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera).
    Also about running on unsuported platforms - I can easily run CRM in Chrome OS or Linux in Chrome or Firefox, I just need to install an extension to fake the browser identification (needs some laboring, as I know, I had to choose "Firefox on Windows" instead of Chrome).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I agree, Chrome is often updated and the most damaging update so far was the modal dialog change they did a few years ago. I also use Chrome mostly, but now also Edge a lot. Many of my colleagues use Firefox so it seems to be a mixed race. IE seems to be slowly dying but some companies still use it as they have old application that depend on it. I wonder for how long that will be though.
      Installing the addon for running Chrome on unsupported platforms is of course doable but still not supported. That would be an interesting blog article to see which platforms you actually can run Dynamics from, especially some weird platforms, like Linux-on-a-stick or something like that.

      Delete
  4. I have now researched the error with chrome a bit more and I think that it has something to do with being logged in to Chrome. I created a new profile on my computer, opened Chrome and signed into a v9.0 instance, and that worked. However, after signing in to Chrome, closing it down and then going back to the instance, it stopped working. I then tried to log out of Chrome, clean all cookies and caches but that didn't work either, still got the same error. The funny thing is that the error is a server based error so there it has to be related to what chrome is sending Dyn 365. Strangly that should be fixed by resetting everything, which I tried, but it didn't work. I will continue investigating this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Really strange. I use at least three different profiles in Chrome for accessing different D365 v9.0.1 organizations. I usually never delete my cache or cookies and always run the newest Chrome version but I do not experience this issue.

      Delete
  5. Hi

    You have tagged CRM2011 but you have excluded from the exercise.
    Please can you advise which browsers are currently supported for use with CRM 2011.

    Thank you

    ReplyDelete