Exploring official support for Microsoft Edge

[Jason Boyer]

As discussed in the July developer meeting we're exploring official support for the staff client in Microsoft Edge now that it is Just Another Chromium Browser. Because it is included with Windows 10 it has fairly broad distribution and IT managers may prefer (/ force) end users to use it rather than download another browser, usually Chrome.

Official support would entail adding Edge testing support to the Angular client, adding Edge support to the Hatch installer, and correcting issues that potentially only effect Edge.

To support this I'm planning to do some side-by-side testing in Chrome and Edge to see if there are any regressions. Given that both are ultimately based on Chromium I expect this is exceptionally unlikely. I'll also supply patches to Evergreen and Hatch to support this in case we want to move forward with advertised support.

[Jason Boyer (jboyer)]

Here is a branch that can add Edge testing support to Angular client builds. Two things to note: 1, the Edge karma launcher won't work with our version of AngularJS, so I left it out and 2, I don't know the cause, but if Edge is not installed my machine just waits forever requiring a Ctrl+C to kill the "npm run test" script. Since I don't expect there is much support behind requiring all Angular devs / users that want to run tests to install all 3 browsers we need to find some other way around this. Maybe separate test-ff, test-chr, test-edge, test-all targets? (And if we do that, do we remove firefox-esr and chromium from the *-devloper build targets...)

karma-detect-browsers is no help because it detects "Chrome" 4 times and Edge not at all, in addition to having it's latest release 3 years ago...

https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/jboyer/lp1939885_edge_testing_support / working/user/jboyer/lp1939885_edge_testing_support

[Jason Boyer (jboyer)]

So fun fact, you can use Edge in npm run test today, just set CHROME_BIN to /usr/bin/microsoft-edge and it works as expected. It may still be worth breaking the test target into multiple pieces so support could be added for Safari (which would only work on MacOS, of course).