WebFacing projects can be run in the Microsoft® Internet Explorer
and Mozilla Firefox browsers. This reference document describes the
differences between the presentation of WebFacing pages in Internet
Explorer and Firefox browsers.
Currently supported browsers
For the list of supported releases
of the Microsoft Internet
Explorer and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers, refer to the HATS prerequisites
section of the HATS Information Center.
Attention: Unless client customizations are explicitly coded
for multiple browser support, they might not work in Firefox. Avoid
using functions only supported by a particular browser in your customizations;
for example, using
document.all() (an Internet Explorer function)
in a customization would cause the application to fail when running
it in a Firefox browser.
To write cross browser
code, the information at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-ie2mozgd/ might
be helpful to you.
An unsupported browser is one
with which the product has not been tested. When you use an unsupported
browser, you receive error message WF0095. If
you want your WebFacing application to run in the unsupported browser
without having the error message issued, set the web.xml variable WFIgnoreBrowserTypeCheck to
true. However, this should only be used for development
and testing of projects. Running the project in an unsupported browser
in production is not recommended.
Differences in WebFacing behavior
when running in Internet Explorer and Firefox
Different browsers can vary in how they present Web
pages, affecting both behavior and rendering. The following list shows
some differences in how WebFacing applications behave and are presented
in Internet Explorer and Firefox.
- Closing WebFacing connections and session reuse:
- When running WebFacing applications in the Firefox browser, closing
of the browser window is not detected, and the WebFacing job continues
to run.
- Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox browser windows
started from same shortcut share the same session. WebFacing allows
only one connection per session and issues (by default) a WebFacing
Session Reuse Error when multiple connections are detected. Expect
this condition to occur more often in Firefox browsers unless you
explicitly exit from your WebFacing applications.
- Rendering differences:
- The layout of an HTML table might be rendered slightly
differently from one browser to another.
- The font of characters might be rendered differently from one
browser to another.
- In Firefox, invalid characters that
appear as spaces, boxes, or not at all in Internet Explorer might
appear as '?' or as hex values.
- In Internet Explorer, the cursor is positioned
at the beginning of a filled input field. Since Firefox does not support
overwrite mode, the cursor is positioned at the end of a filled input
field.
- Formatted fields work differently in Internet Explorer
and Firefox:
- Initial caret position and html rendering in a date field:
- In Internet Explorer, the caret appears at the beginning of the
field and the month, day, and year characters are close together.
- In Firefox, the caret follows the first character of the field
and the month, day, and year characters appear to have spaces between
them.
- Character overwrite:
- Behavior of the caret when it is at the end of a field:
- In Internet Explorer, typing a character, for example
'4', with the cursor at the end of a filled EDTMSK segment causes
tabbing to the next segment and overwrites its first character with
'4'. If the next segment originally contained '00', it would now contain
'40'.
- In Firefox, typing the same character with the
cursor at the end of a filled EDTMSK segment causes tabbing to the
next segment and replaces the segment's entire contents with '4' in
the previous example.
- WebFacing bidirectional support is not available
in Firefox.