Is there any way for me as a user to turn off the annoying Browser Check popup in VISTA 8?
I'm using FF 6 and it has been giving me the popup nearly every time I have logged on for the past year (so, also in FF 4 and 5 over 3 different computer systems I use). If I have Java disabled it pops up every time (I'd prefer my browser to be secure, and the Java features just slow down (or freeze) VISTA with features that I never use).
I'm tired of this and am just looking for any solution as to how I can permanently get rid of that useless window, but the way that VISTA is coded I can't even figure out what I would have to block in my popup/adblocker in order to kill the window.
Andrew
Unfortunately there is nothing you can do other than to go back to using a supported browser. See http://kb.blackboard.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=45581177 for a list of browsers supported by Vista 8.
Browser compatibility has been an issue since the beginnings of Learning Management Systems back in the 1990's as there is no way to keep up with the browser development.
Just a side note on your turning off JAVA in that quite a bit of Vista 8 is written in JAVA and I am surprised that you are able to much at all inside your course.
Hope this helps
Harold
The fact that there is even an automatic browser check is really stupid though. How many support tickets does it prevent? Probably next to none.
Since it is a popup, there must be some piece of javascript or other code that invokes the new page, unfortunately I can't find it (I think it is hidden in a redirect page), otherwise I would just block it through my popup software and be done with it.
If VISTA was programmed properly, using web standards, there would be zero need to worry about browser compatibility as all modern browsers would be compatible, or would at the very most require minor tweaks to ensure compatibility between them. This isn't 1997, when web standards weren't prevalent between browsers, this is 2011 where all major browsers can render properly coded web apps properly, without worrying about the version.
My courses almost exclusively use the VISTA pages as file hosting, because VISTA is hated by the profs. who use it for anything else. Yet my university insists in making them use it since they paid god knows how much money for the system license. Thus I rarely need the Java features, and on the rare occasion I need them, it is relatively trivial to re-enable Java.
This is a serious problem. Is there any point in having this Pop-Up run EVERY SINGLE TIME? If the developers understand that there is no way they can keep up with new browser updates (which is absurd because it should take much less time to test a browser's compatibility with Vista rather than updating a browser, which requires much more strenuous compatibility tests) , why even include it in the code? This is equivalent to saying that the programmers intended to have an annoying Pop-up every time a student logs into the system, which is almost always more than once a day, and at a time when students have little patience due to schoolwork.
Also, as the previous poster said, it has been quite a long time from the 1990s, and perhaps Blackboard Inc. should realize this and update their software more frequently.
Xinbo,
It's not really a question of Blackboard updating their software more frequently, but of schools being willing and able to upgrade servers. The Blackboard product has version update approximately every three months, and the most recent versions of Blackboard are certified as compatible with the most current versions of IE and Firefox and do not include any browser checker.
Mike