Blackboard slacking on new browsers support

posted on Apr 7, 2011 by in 3TU, Blackboard

Today the release notes of Blackboard 9.1 SP5 were published (only accessible with BtB-account). This release is a bugfix release, but also got some new features, especially around the security of the system. Every release Blackboard also updates the support server and client platforms. I was surprised to see the Client Configurations that are supported in this release:

Blackboard SP5 Client Configuration
Client configuration Mac

As you can see, all the new browsers (Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4 and Google Chrome) that were released recently are not supported. I'm especially disappointed that Blackboard is still not supporting Google Chrome. If you look at the most recent browser market shares, you can see that Chrome already has more than 10% market share. At our Blackboard system, Google Chrome is already the most used browser, with a share of 29%.

If you look at the certified browsers, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6 and Safari 5.0, on Windows you have to use an old browser. And the Mac you can use Safari, which is up-to-date.

Within the Blackboard Usergroup (nlbbug) most institutions can only upgrade in the summer and most teams are already preparing for their upgrade. So SP6 will be released too late for this summer's upgrade. This means that we have to wait another year before we can officially support IE9 and FF4 and Chrome.

2 comments

Comment from: Arald [Visitor]

I’m not sure but maybe there is a serious problem with making Blackboard compatible with Chrome. I’ve seen other site behaving really strange in Chrome as well and also the PDF plug-ins for Chrome don’t work as well and handy as they do for Firefox and IE. When a browser is popular it doesn’t automatically mean it’s good or a mature product. I used Chrome a few times but went back to Firefox and IE because it did not work well enough on too many sites. On the Mac I use Safari and that works great. So far no problem on that with any site. With Blackboard our experience is that it works best with Firefox.

Comment from: Nestorsupport [Visitor]

A lot of our users use Google Chrome and we almost don’t have issues. It works just as good or even better than Firefox and certainly better than IE. However, looking at the release notes for SP5 Blackboard mentions that IE9 and Firefox4 are under provisional support, because they were released too late to perform complete testing.

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