No support for Microsoft Edge

[RandomArker]

There needs to be some kind of check to make sure that features, such as TextEncoder, are available before use and if not then provide an alternative.

Many work places are still limited to Microsoft only browsers and it would be useful if this could work from those.

I realise that Internet Explorer is probably not a valid target (Especially as Windows 7 will be out of support soon) and there would have to be a lot of custom implementation to sort this, but I don't think supporting Edge should be outside of scope

[RubenVerborgh]

We definitely aim to support Edge, but I cannot test on Edge for lack of a Windows machine.

Is TextEncoder the only blocker or are the more?

[RandomArker]

It does appear to be the case, reading through the code (and modifying a few references)

Although I think there may be some issues with rdflib as well, which makes it a little difficult to play with.

JavaScript is not my primary language, so I may be wrong on this

[RandomArker]

Update.

Yes it is just TextEncoder. wrote a quick sample application to test.

modified the "solid-auth-client-bundle.js" by simply commenting out this line:
"var r = t.TextEncoder ? t.TextEncoder : n(58).TextEncoder;"

and I can successfully fetch and display a list of "knows"

[RubenVerborgh]

Thanks for testing, will look into this.

[alexstanford]

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/status/encodingstandard/?q=Encoding

Looks like Microsoft has support in development for a coming release of Edge. In light of this, perhaps it is of low priority to add alternative code to support Edge only for it to be unnecessary soon.

[bushidocodes]

This one is kind of a big deal IMO. I definitely suggest formalizing a browser support matrix and using some of the tools around browserslist to get this addressed. Bugs like this have the risk of turning of the JavaScript engineers we need to attract to the platform. At a minimum, I'd expect upstream dependencies for any of my side projects to support the last two major versions of all major browsers (or at least have a documented happy path to polyfill).

If you're a user trying to polyfill this downstream, perhaps check out fast-text-encoding (https://github.com/samthor/fast-text-encoding). Be sure to polyfill popup.html too.

[megoth]

Just to have it mentioned here, caniuse.com is a really useful tool to check for support on specific APIs, e.g. https://caniuse.com/#search=TextEncoder

[gibsonf1]

We definitely aim to support Edge, but I cannot test on Edge for lack of a Windows machine.

Is TextEncoder the only blocker or are the more?

My main machine is Ubuntu, but I run Windows 10 in a virtual box vm for testing - works great and no charge.

[james-martin-jd]

I ran into this issue recently as well - Edge and IE both throw errors related to missing references. +1 to this issue.

[brownhoward]

Been doing some research on this issue. As noted by @alexstanford, "Encoding Standard" was in development by Microsoft for MS Edge. Microsoft have now released Canary, Dev and Beta channel downloads for the latest version (v75) of MS Edge which is being rewritten to use the Chromium engine: https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/download

I downloaded the latest development version (v75.0.131.0 (Official build) dev (64-bit)), and the application that was throwing the error in previous versions of MS Edge is now working correctly.

Unfortunately no information on when the release version of MS Edge will be available.

[brownhoward]

The Chromium version of MS Edge will be released for Windows and MacOS on 15-Jan-2020: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/11/04/edge-chromium-release-candidate-get-ready/#pFPLt77HPWrI13wm.97