Small Talks/2021/November/Handling Unsupported Browsers

Author
Hawk Chen, Engineer, Potix Corporation

Date
Nov. 23, 2021

Version
ZK 8.5 and above

The Purpose

When an end-user visits your web application with an unsupported browser, you may want to inform him proactively that the browser is not supported to avoid potential problems. With an unsupported browser, it is very likely that some features won't work as expected, giving the user an unpleasant user experience and wasting the developer's time to escalate or look into these issues.

This short talk demonstrates how you can show a friendly message to remind end-users to update their browsers:

Steps to Install Notification

We are going to leverage 3rd party services that provide a simple script to detect browsers and show a notification:

• https://browser-update.org/
• https://updatemybrowser.org/widget

With <embed> element in zk.xml, you can easily install such notification in your zk web application. Here I am demonstrating an example code using https://browser-update.org/ for ZK 8.5 or later versions:

notification code for ZK 8.5 or above in zk.xml

    <device-config>
        <device-type>ajax</device-type>
        <embed><![CDATA[
<script>
var $buoop = {required:{e:10,f:81,o:68,s:12,c:83},insecure:true,unsupported:true,api:2021.10 };
function $buo_f(){
 var e = document.createElement("script");
 e.src = "//browser-update.org/update.min.js";
 document.body.appendChild(e);
};
try {document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", $buo_f,false)}
catch(e){window.attachEvent("onload", $buo_f)}
</script>
     ]]></embed>
    </device-config>

If you need to show the notification based on a different browser version criteria, please visit the 3rd party websites above and generate a different script, then replace the <script> inside <embed>.