Disclaimer: This may be a better question on SuperUser, but my use
case matches SO.
I'm trying to develop an Angular app on my local computer; I'm not yet ready to set up a webserver or anything like that. I'm loading some JSON configuration files from the same directory, and I'm running into Origin Policy issues (which was expected).
I know that programs like gChat can run multiple instances with the /mutex flag (I think that's it, it's been a while since I tried that). Is there any such provision for Google Chrome? Basically, I'd like to run Chrome as my main browser for everything I do, and then open a separate instance with lowered web security for testing purposes.
Thanks!
You can bring up a development web server, serving data from the current working directory, using:
python -mSimpleHTTPServer
This doesn't directly answer your question, I know. But hopefully it's even better than a direct answer. :)
I found a solution to this - although Chrome won't let you run multiple instances, you can run Chrome and Chrome Canary side-by-side simultaneously. So now, Chrome is my main browser, and Chrome Canary (with the --disable-web-security) flag is my testing environment. So far, I haven't had any issues with discrepancies between the browsers.
Related
I'm resurrecting an old project of mine as a way to learn some new stuff.
I'm doing this code lab from IO Add Your Web App to a User's Home Screen.
Is there any way, other than connecting a phone and waiting a lot, to test if users will be shown the prompt below?
I've tested it with Lighthouse and all tests come back green, but I've never seen the prompt. It feels very random at the moment.
The answer to This question puts the stuggle into perspective:
The user has visited your site twice over two separate days during the course of two weeks
Does that mean I need to wait 2 days between changes to see if it worked?
Enable chrome://flags/#bypass-app-banner-engagement-checks and you will see the banner as long as you have a manifest (configured correctly) and are on HTTPS and have a service worker.
Increasing Engagement with Web App Install Banners
anshulix has correctly answered the question, but I thought I'd put in a more verbose answer.
To remove the waiting and other requirements for the save to homescreen prompt, then you need to enable a flag.
Enable chrome://flags/#bypass-app-banner-engagement-checks and you will see the banner as long as you have a manifest (configured correctly) and are on HTTPS and have a service worker.
Which comes from Increasing Engagement with Web App Install Banners
It's important to remember that you are setting this flag on the mobile browser, not on your desktop browser. For some reason this didn't occur to be for a while!
You also need to restart mobile Chrome for the flag to take effect. If you've got your tabs mixed in with your other apps, this can be tricky because you need to hunt down all the tabs and close them. (Or find a better way to close Chrome.)
I found it much easier to do this debugging in Chrome Dev, rather than regular chrome because a) I know it's got the latest fixes in it, and b) because I only have 1 tab open, so it's easy to restart the browser.
If you are doing remote inspection, there is an issue about the messages that come up in the console. In Chrome 50 you get:
App banner not shown: could not determine the best icon to use
This doesn't seem to be true; in more recent builds—e.g. mobile Chrome 52—save to desktop works just fine. It's a disconcerting but useless error.
As a bonus helpful thing, realfavicongenerator does an excellent job of generating all the icons and the manifest file that you need.
I am doing some web development and am serving some files locally. Now both Chrome and Firefox wont allow me this because of their origin policy. As I prefer Chrome, I chose to to use it in unsafe mode by adding the --disable-web-security flag.
While this works perfectly, there is a slight issue I am facing. I can't run the chrome instance in unsafe mode while my another chrome instance is running in normal mode. If I open new instance by opening the unsafe mode chrome shortcut whilst my regular instance is running, the new instance also opens in regular mode; and vice-versa.
Is there a way to open both simultaneously? If so, how do I achieve this?
PS: I will use two different browsers for this as my last option. I would like to avoid this as far as possible
I found the answer on a Linux SuperUSer forum at
https://superuser.com/questions/593726/is-it-possible-to-run-chrome-with-and-without-web-security-at-the-same-time
I earlier thought this could only be done in Linux but this is also possible in Windows. Essentially we are asking a chrome to create a new instance altogether than sharing the same instance. We do this by giving it a location to store it's data. You can read about this in the above shared link.
this morning I noticed my Chrome updated to Chrome 22 and that the search in the top right has been removed and can now be accessed with ctrl-f.
I also noticed that ctrl-shift-f is no longer working as expected... (but this is inconsistent)
The global search has been a huge time saver for me, and now sometimes it doesn't work until I've viewed a script at least once.
For example, I have 5 scripts that I know all contain "fn_init"
I search for fn_init and nothing comes up.
I open one of those scripts and then ctrl-shift-f again, and finally get a matching result for just the one file...
Is this working as intended? Am I missing an option or something? My dev tools config options are:
General
Disabled cached
Sources
Show folders checked
Search in content scripts checked
Also: how can I install an older version of Chrome and stop it from updating automatically?
To get an older version of Chrome your best bet is to find a build of Chromium from https://chromium-build.appspot.com/p/chromium/console however if this if for devtools stability you are missing out on a lot of new features and bug fixes.
As for Search across all files it is still there and CTRL-SHIFT-F on Windows and CMD-OPT-F on Mac. See Addy Osmani's post https://plus.google.com/115133653231679625609/posts/e4W2kdrFJY9
If you find issues as bugs, it is better to raise the issue on http://crbug.com/new as it will get direct attention from the engineering team there.
If Microsoft's method for using IE as a local host for HTA's then, can I use any other browser instead?
You can't.
There is a similar Mozilla project named XULRunner, but HTA only works in Internet Explorer - the two technologies aren't compatible.
To make this clear: HTA will probably not work in anything that's not IE. Yes, HTA is a browser control in a window, but it also has normal aplication privileges (i.e. filesystem access, registry, arbirary code execution etc.). When running in a browser, these privileges are denied (for good reasons - you don't want just any webpage to read your files).
So, launching the HTA in a browser will work, but any interaction with the local system will fail, which negates the whole idea. Launching a HTA in XULRunner will also fail, because XULRunner uses a completely different API.
The only scenario that could possibly work is this: a webapp which doesn't use any of the HTA-specific or XULRunner-specific API (i.e. behaves like a normal browser app). In such case, your app might work with HTA, XULRunner, as well as in any browser. Incidentally, this would take away any advantage of using HTA and introduce masive security holes because of the higher privileges; you'd be better off with using Google Chrome or Mozilla Prism for that.
(We've been trying to find a cross-browser solution for some time, and HTA is definitely not it)
I was tackling the related task of running hta's from various browsers. I've put my findings here for anybody else who is trying to do that and finds this question.
You can run hta's from several browsers, using the same mshta executable that IE uses. You need fully qualified URI's in your hta code, which isn't needed from IE.
Today (2011-02-01) I tried using hta's from Firefox (3.6.13), Opera 11 and Safari for Windows 5.0.3.
After some teething problems in Firefox I got hta's to work from those browsers. (In all cases these use the same mshta executable that IE uses. This is not hta's running in other browsers, but running hta's from other browsers. This might suit your purposes.)
The hta started desktop applications on my machine (as it does from IE).
The experience wasn't perfect. For IE I set root relative paths in the hta. For the other browsers you can't do that. You need to set fully qualified URI's for things like images, referenced hta's and icons.
So after a little editing I have the hta's working from 4 browsers (IE 8, FF 3, Opera 11 and Safari 5 (Windows)).
(Quick snapshot of that. I'm running hta's from a web server on the local machine. (I have no plans to run them from remote sites.) This allows my workflow to go from browser to desktop more smoothly. The hta's fire up local applications that do things like edit web pages (including the hta's themselves), validate those pages and fire up IDE's. Bridging the gap between browser and desktop apps. has been a liberating experience. I recommend it!)
Notes:
The Firefox development team have notes about enabling hta's which encouraged me to continue after initial failure.
To achieve this in Firefox configuration I set HTML applications to run under mshta.exe (called Microsoft HTML Application Host, in the combo box). Initially that didn't work. I selected "other" picked the same application by hand. That worked, though I have two identical looking entries! You need mshta.exe on your machine to run for any browser. I assume the normal way to install mshta is with IE. (mshta is essentially a modified version of IE, possibly not the current version!)
The Firefox developers have marked this as a strategic effort to dislodge IE from the Enterprise. Their implementation (and Opera's) force you to use fully qualified URI's but apart from that the hta's work as expected.
Firefox seems to cache old versions of the hta's, and doesn't download new ones, though it appears to download something! You might need to clear the cache during development.
My first attempt to do it with Chrome was not successful. Further investigation suggests Chrome doesn't have a native interface for invoking other processes, based on their file extension.
It isn't so much that IE hosts anything, but that mshta.exe hosts components it shares with IE. MSHTA is a script host, much as CScript and WScript are. While IE is also a script host (in the strictest sense) its primary purpose is to be a Web browser.
The Mozilla project mentioned previously is the closest alternative I have found that is based on a browser's innards.
Other script hosts exist for windows too. One of these is NS Basic/Desktop but it is based on standard Windows controls, not browser rendering and an HTML DOM.
Just to be clear: It is not IE nor MSHTMA that really renders a webpage. The rendering thing is partly build into the OS. Thus, things like Active Desktop (does anybody remember that XP thing?) or .HTA or .CHM work without IE. It's just the same way to recognise some HTML things.
I believe Internet Explorer's hosting of HTA apps works because their HTA host is registered to handle the extension. If this is indeed the case then in theroy another host could be used
For the sake of completeness I should note that I am not expeirienced in the development of HTA applications and am basing my response on my understanding of the Windows OS
First off if you're unaware, samba or smb == Windows file sharing, \\computer\share etc.
I have a bunch of different files on a bunch of different computers. It's mostly media and there is quite a bit of it. I'm looking into various ways of consolidating this into something more manageable.
Currently there are a few options I'm looking at, the most insane of which is some kind of samba share indexer that would generate a list of things shared on the various samba servers I tell it about and upload them to a website which could then be searched and browsed.
It's a cheap solution, OK?
Ignoring the fact that the idea is obviously a couple of methods short of a class, do you chaps know of any way to link to samba file shares in html in a cross-browser way? In windows one does \\computer\share, in linux one does smb://computer/share, neither of which work afaik from browsers that aren't also used as file managers (e.g. any browser that isn't Internet Explorer).
Some Clarifications
The computers used to access this website are a mixture of WIndows (XP) and Linux (Ubuntu) with a mixture of browsers (Opera and Firefox).
In linux entering smb://computer/share only seems to work in Nautilus (and presumably Konqueror / Dolphin for you KDE3.5/4 people). It doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (Firefox does nothing, Opera complains the URL is invalid).
I don't have a Windows box handy atm so I'm unsure if \\computer\share works in anything apart from IE (e.g. Firefox / Opera).
If you have a better idea for consolidating a bunch of random samba shares (it certainly can't get much worse than mine ;-)) it's worth knowing that there is no guarantee that any of the servers I would be wanting to index / consolidate would be up at any particular moment. Moreover, I wouldn't want the knowledge of what they have shared lost or hidden just because they weren't available. I would want to know that they share 'foo' but they are currently down.
Hmm, protocol handlers look interesting.
As Mark said, in Windows protocol handlers can be dealt with at the OS level
Protocol handlers can also be done at the browser level (which is preferred, as it is cross platform and doesn't involve installing anything).
Summary of how it works in Firefox
Summary of how it works in Opera
I'd probably just setup Apache on the SAMBA servers and let it serve the files via HTTP. That'd give you a nice autoindex default page too, and you could just wget and concatenate each index for your master list.
A couple of other thoughts:
file://server/share/file is the defacto Windows way of doing it
You can register protocol handlers in Windows, so you could register smb and redirect it to file://. I'd suspect GNOME/KDE/etc. would offer the same.
To make the links work cross platform you could look at the User Agent either in a CGI script or in JavaScript and update your URLs appropriately.
Alternatively, if you want to consolidate SMB shares you could try using Microsoft DFS (which also works with Samba).
You set up a DFS root and tell it about all the other SMB/Samba shares you have in your environment. Clients then connect to the root and see all the shares as if they were hosted on that single root machine; the root silently redirects clients to the correct system when they open a share.
Think of it as like symbolic links or a virtual file system for SMB.
It would solve your browsing problem. I'm not sure if it would solve your searching one.