[LON-CAPA-dev] LON-CAPA browser compatibility

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Just an update on using LON-CAPA on different browsers.

In the current unstable release (not yet on the production machines),
several issues have been removed, but one big one remains:

* LON-CAPA seems to run fine with Netscape 6.2 now
* Mozilla basically works okay, except for some random problems. Not
sure if origin is LON-CAPA or Mozilla
* group import and group search do not crash Macintosh browsers anymore
* most of the compatibility issues regarding newer version Internet
Explorer on PC and Mac have been resolved, BUT the big hangup is a bug
in IE's treatment of bitwise operations in JavaScript. Basically,
bitwise OR and bitwise AND are broken for certain bitpatterns. This
affects our "freeware encryption" on the login page. If you get lucky,
the bitpatterns you deal with, according to the random encryption key
you get, do not hit on the bugs, and you can log in. Most of the time,
you will not be lucky. We now need to devise a workaround which is
probably going to consume more processing time and make the code worse.

- Gerd.