[Koha-devel] ES6 usage in the staff client

[David Cook]

I agree with Michael. While great strides have been made to get people off of IE6 and IE7 and Windows XP, there are still a lot of professionals being forced by their IT departments to use older versions of Windows and older versions of Internet Explorer. 

Over the years, I've upstreamed a number of IE fixes and in a sense been a de facto Koha IE maintainer, but it sounds like that might not be possible in this case. If we go too far away from what users - rather than developers - actually use... then I think we have a problem. I think we'd be forfeiting users and potential users of Koha to other systems or to out-dated versions of Koha. 

Maybe this is a crossroads where developing multiple themes again might be a good idea. I don't love the idea, but that might be one way of having an up-to-date backend with a modern front-end and a legacy front-end for people who can't have a modern option. In that case, it would be all the more reason for keeping business logic in code rather than templates. But that's just one idea.

Then again... maybe completely breaking Koha's staff end for IE users would make professionals put more demands on their IT departments. Demands such that IT departments were forced to actually support Firefox or Chrome. I wouldn't hold my breath, but... you never know. I could see us bending over backwards locally to provide an option to IE users though. And off the top of my head that would probably mean staying on an older version of Koha or trying to create our own theme to work with an upgraded backend or to replace the staff client all together with a simplified cross-browser user interface. 

David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St
Ultimo, NSW 2007
Australia

Office: 02 9212 0899
Direct: 02 8005 0595

-----Original Message-----
From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Michael Kuhn
Sent: Friday, 4 August 2017 10:04 PM
To: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] ES6 usage in the staff client

Am 04.08.2017 um 13:48 schrieb Owen Leonard:
>>    * Use ES6 classes. This will work in Firefox 45+ (which includes 
>> two ESR releases), Chrome 42+, Edge and Safari 9
> 
> I'm leaning towards this option, but it would be nice to get some 
> feedback from users (or from support companies who ask their users?) 
> who might be required by their workplace to use IE.
> 
> What are you working on?

In
https://koha-community.org/manual/17.05/html/00_intro.html#koha-recommendations
the documentation says: "When working in the Koha staff client it is strongly recommended that you use the Firefox browser. Koha’s staff client is not supported in Internet Explorer and has not yet been fully optimized for Google Chrome."

Personally I am working with Mozilla Firefox 54.0.

But a lot of Koha staff users still work on MS Internet Explorer and usually they are FORCED to do so by their IT departments. Probably many or even most library users are also using the MS Internet Explorer when accessing the OPAC, so I think this unloved webbrowser definitely has to be supported in one way or the other (if not both).

Best wishes: Michael
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