Firefox 3 - Life at the Bleeding Edge

Adrian Spender  June 20 2008 11:00:00 AM

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Special guest author, Adrian Spender!
I'm a software engineer in IBM's Dublin lab and am the technical lead on the new Home Page component of Lotus Connections 2.0. 2008 is my tenth year in IBM and previously to Connections I worked on the development of various middleware products including WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. I hold a degree in Information Systems from the University of Leeds in the UK.
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Hopefully many of you are now exploring the features and capabilities of the newly released Lotus Connections 2.0. We are very proud of it and we think you'll like it too.

I suspect many of you are also enjoying the newly released Firefox 3 browser. I know I am. I have been very impressed with the speed of the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine in particular (I'm not so sure about the way it handles self-signed certificates though.)

Those of you at the bleeding edge have probably tried running Connections 2.0 in Firefox 3. If you have you may well have noticed that there are some problems, particularly with the new Home Page and when viewing people's profiles. In fact that is putting it mildly - Home Page in particular just won't render much of its content.

So, time to 'fess up. Yes, we knew about this before the product shipped. As with any IBM software product we spend some time working out what hardware and software we will support for a particular release. Much of this is driven by what we hear from our customers. Hence, the supported browser list for Lotus Connections 2.0 is:

• Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows
• Firefox 2 on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X

You can see all of the hardware and software platform details here: http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg27011798

You'll notice that it doesn't say Firefox 3 and it doesn't say Firefox 2+ either. The supported platforms feed into a complex matrix that our test teams ensure get a thorough level of testing before the product goes out of the door. What we are guilty of here is taking the official support statement a bit too literally in this case. Yes, we knew about the issue, and yes we let it out of the door. We knew about it because, probably like you, we are geeks at heart and like to use the latest and greatest. We had the betas and the release candidates.

So, guilty as charged. The good news however is that there will be an ifix to resolve this particular issue in the very near future. What we cannot promise is that every aspect of Connections 2.0 will work seamlessly on Firefox 3, because at the end of the day it hasn't had the level of testing we give the supported browsers. After all, we did actually ship before they did! What about other browsers? Safari? Flock? Opera? Well, they are not supported, and there may be problems. Opera just plain doesn't work for some aspects of the Connections UI. We've never heard anybody tell us it is an important browser for us to support but if you think it is let us know. For Safari, there are a good few of us in the development organization who use Macs day in and day out (myself included) and Safari, whilst there are some known problems (for instance - clicking on a link to an activity item from the Home Page will not work, you'll have to go in via the activities dashboard) has nothing that can be classed as an epic fail as far as I know. Most browsers should work by and large, and the kind of specific issue we had with Firefox 3 is a rare occurrence.

We will never be able to test and officially support every possible browser that is out there and may be coming down the line (yes we have looked at and will continue to look at IE8...) what we can do better is to try and spot any show stoppers. Hopefully we can fix them, but at worst we should document them so that you know.

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