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Discussions Royal TSX (for macOS) Ideas

WebPlugin with full HTML5 support like Chrome

I can`t use Royal TSX to manage vCenter and ESX today via html5 interface. Safari webplugin is not supported by VMware because lack of full html5 compatibility. For example, tasks are not displayed, blue screen instead of login prompt in esxi.


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Hi Felix, I have made a screen recording -- uploaded to youtube for your viewing -- https://youtu.be/a8r-a0udJ0A -- pardon with the quality, it was just upload so the higher quality may not be completed 


yethttps://youtu.be/a8r-a0udJ0A.

Hi Reynold,


I cannot reproduce the unsupported browser issue but obviously I don't have an account and can't check what happens after login.

Which user agent string did you use?


Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "the session is not saved at all", can you please elaborate?


thx,

felix

looks like this is related to my issue. I'm getting unsupported browser from https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/, and even with user agent is faked, the session is not saved at all.

Hi Wojciech,


I don't quite understand what you mean by "tasks are still invisible". Could you please elaborate? A screenshot would probably also help.


thx,

felix

But tasks are still invisible :( It is the biggest problem because it very important in daily tasks.

@RMN IT:

We were previously able to reproduce the "stuck blue screen" issue but this seems to have been resolved in newer version of the HTML5 client.


Regarding auto fill:

There are two problems:

  1. The VMware web client loads its login UI using JavaScript and it takes an unknown amount of time to appear. If you configure a high enough delay in the auto fill settings you can get the page to properly fill the HTML fields.
  2. The VMware web client doesn't allow login until it receives real(!) keypresses in both, the username and password fields. Unfortunately this cannot be simulated using JavaScript so even if you get the fields to properly auto fill you will not be able to click login. As a workaround you can enter a blank and immediately remove it in both fields. This will then enable the login button

We are using the Web plugin to access our esx hosts. It does show a blue screen which is annoying but right click in the window and select Reload and then the login prompt should display. Irritating but at least it works. We have the URL configured for the esx host console to: https://esxhostname/ui/#/login and the engine set as Modern. I still can not get it to autofill the credentials and I have tried several different methods. If anyone knows how to get it to do that properly please comment.

Exactly, you can use a site like whatsmyuseragent.org to grab the user agent string of Safari and paste that in the "Use custom User Agent String" field in the "Advanced" settings of your web connection. That should get rid of the warning.

Hello,


It's using the VCSA, ver 6.5.0.22000. I've not tried vSphere in Safari, it's not a browser I tend to use (Chrome, Firefox preferred).


I think when I have a few moments to spin up a lab environment I'll try using TSX with the Webkit plugin, I see I can set a custom UI string in the plug-in so I could make the message go-away and see how things work.


Thanks,


Andrew. 

Hi Andrew,


which version of vSphere would that be? I'm not seeing such a warning here.

In any case, this is likely due to a hard-coded browser version check which is bad practice. Instead, one should check if the required features are supported by the browser. It's unlikely that this causes any issues since I'm not aware of any API calls that are made by the VMware web client which aren't supported by Safari.


Do you see the same warning when accessing your vSphere environment using Safari?


cheers,

felix

Hello Felix,


Well I've not gone beyond the point that vSphere warns you that you are using an unsupported browser (Firefox ≥ 34 or Chrome ≥ 39 on MacOS) - I don't have a test vSphere environment to try it on and I'm not risking a live one.


Sorry, no idea about Firefox SDKs or APIs - I'm just a lowly sysadmin :) I'd assumed there would be something seeing as FF is open source but it seems not.


Regards,


Andrew. 

Hi Andrew,


exactly what problems do you have with the vSphere client in Royal TSX?

We have multiple ESX lab installations here and all can be accessed using the Royal TSX WebKit plugin just fine.


If you're aware of a SDK/API for embedding Firefox in Mac applications I'm all ears.


cheers,

felix

How about a plug-in based on Firefox's engine instead of Chrome (I like Chrome as a browser but it does 'do it's own thing' a bit too much)? As the others have noted, not being able to use the vSphere HTML5 client in Royal TXS is a pain, especially when I can manage pretty much everything else from TSX (which I really like!).

The problem is not shipping a 200MB plugin. The problem is that all of the chromium based SDKs require some kind of hook into the app which makes a plugin impossible. The 200MB would need to be added to the app with no way of letting the user decide if he wants or needs those extra 200MB for a browser engine that's based on the same roots as Safari (WebKit).

I rather give up 200MB and have full HTML 5 support. If it will be added is always up to the user to make the choice between small royal tsx footprint and installing the 200MB plugin with HTML 5 support.
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