Sharepoint 2007 + Firefox = No rich editing

Wow, talk about perfect timing. I was just about to complai…er…blog about this, and one of the Microsoft folks blogs the first definitive statement about it that I’ve found.

That’s right - when using Windows SharePoint Services 2007 with Firefox (and Mozilla and Safari), you get get a down-level browsing experience. In particular, the rich text editing features aren’t supported. I discovered this for myself recently while playing with the beta, and frankly was stunned. This isn’t rocket science folks, this is a solved problem.

The most ironic part of Troy’s post is the comment that “we knew that our new features such as wikis, blogs, and RSS would make us very attractive for Internet facing sites”. Um, not without decent Firefox support it won’t. Even internally, fuggetaboutit – I was hoping to replace our current internal Wiki software with WSS 2007, but now that plan is out the window.

I’m surprised more people in the community aren’t complaining about this yet. I suspect that they will soon enough. When is Microsoft going to realize that Firefox support isn’t some nit feature to get prioritized away, but rather just part of the cost of being web enabled?

18 Comments

  • I continue to be mystified by Microsoft's apparent insistence that other browsers (non-IE) either don't exist, or just don't count.

    Just look at ClickOnce - all that hype and then it doesn't work seamlessly except with Internet Explorer. Are they rushing to fix that?

  • The interesting thing is that when I got x-browser editing working in Perspective the real painful bit is getting HTML edited in one browser to be editable in others as they all use different means of expressing the same formatting and will only edit what they produce.

    WYSIWYG editing components such as FCKEditor, while really cool don't seem to help with this!

  • stop crying!

    just install the IE Tab extension for Firefox and open your sharepoint site in a tab using IE rendering. you can have your rich-text editor that way.

  • @Alan Slater

    How is that going to work on a Mac? You idiot.

  • i hate windows, say how it works in linux??? please

  • just a bunch of haters from linux / mac. look for solution instead talk about your religion.

  • all solutions are about firefox in windows, i said it because anyone tried to solve this problem in windows.
    btw i wont talk about my religion

  • The bottom line is Sharepoint is supposed to be a portal server. It should not matter what folks want to use in order to access the portal. Cross browser support is present in most professional web apps. It's a sure bet Microsoft went out of their way to make sure Sharepoint did not work with Sharepoint. Just another example of the whole behavior that got them sued by the government. Too bad the government didn't do anything to them. Wimps!

  • Well, here's the thing: if Microsoft were to extend full support to browsers other than IE, or were to make IE available on other platforms with full support, then OS X et. al. would be much more attractive business platforms. Then again, maybe it's simpler than that--isn't it the lack of ActiveX support that limits what a browser can do with SharePoint?

    Maybe I'm just missing something...

  • Depends on your perspective, Mark. Is it FF's lack of proprietary ActiveX that is causing the problem, or is it MS's refusal to code a web portal to web standards that's causing the problem?

  • IE extension tab is not supported for Mac..

    Microsoft is bunch of assholes

  • The RadEditor is the ideal solution for this problem, thnx (btw works in safari, ff, and chrome)

  • No cross browser support? How long can they continue to do this? They turned me in to an anti-Windows ambassador with Vista, now they're arguing a great case of "windows based" cloud computing. That doesn't work for me at least, I work in Linux, Mac and Windows. I need to jump between each and use Sharepoint in each. I'm going to begin lobbying for getting away from Sharepoint. This is awkward that this topic even exists.

    Hey if they wanna exclude a group of people from their group of potential customers, more power to them. I wonder how well that will work for them.

    We also have a LifeRay portal running here, I'm gonna see if I can get this to do our issue tracking for us. Silly Microsoft, I tried working with them!

  • One thing that nobody has mentioned yet is that all of this worked in Sharepoint before SP1. I was just setting up my company's Sharepoint server today and after I installed SP1 I found that this was broken for Firefox. At first I thought that the upgrade blew up and broke stuff, but I soon found out that this was deliberate sabotage from Microsoft. It used to work perfectly with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.
    I guess I'm going to go install Telerik's RadEditor. *sigh*

  • Maturity level of the comments on these sites is wonderful. Grow up , push up your geek glasses, and get a life so you do not have to name call on websites like this one.

  • Hi,

    I was having the same problem. If you want to use FireFox with Sharepoint than please install IEtab plugin for FireFox (IE render module for FireFox). For me it works perfectly ... I can use all advanced features which gives IE in Sharepoint and use my belowed firefox :D

    ---
    br, zamelsky

  • Unfortunately, IE Tab is no longer compatible with Firefox 3.6.

  • IE Tab 2 is available now. Actually just installed it myself and works like a charm. Not sure if the original had this, but you can specify for some sites to always use the IE rendering engine, which is pretty handy.

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