Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Google's Chrome Browser and Blackboard

Google has developed a browser known as Chrome.

Tests of the Blackboard using the Chrome browser have been largely encouraging, with many functions on the site working perceivably faster than is typical with Internet Explorer and even Firefox.



However we have not had time to fully test and vet the Blackboard application in Chrome. Please let us know if you find additional issues beyond the ones described here.


Known issues with Blackboard on Chrome:

1. Blackboard Grade Center final column missing bug:  in Blackboard version 9.1.x, when viewing the Grade Center using the Chrome Browser's 90% zoom setting or lower, the right-most column may disappear.  This problem can be corrected by changing the zoom value back to 100% and/or changing the width of the Chrome browser window.

2.  The Quicktime plugin sometimes crashes in Chrome.  If you have a lot of video content (e.g. .mp4 files) posted in your course, you may have better luck accessing them with Firefox than with Chrome.

Please send any comments or issues you discover to ats@neu.edu

Thank you for using Blackboard at Northeastern University!

8 comments:

Jared said...

Have you found that the main menu in Blackboard courses sometimes gets 'squished' on the left side of the screen, making it unusable in Chrome? (We're using Vista 8).

Northeastern University ATS said...

Hi Jared,

We haven't had that problem (of the interface getting "squished"), however we are using Blackboard version 7.3, not the "Vista" version which was originally WebCT). It's likely that we're not seeing that issue because the versions are so different. Thanks very much for mentioning it, though; it may help someone viewing this page.

Unknown said...

Has anyone noticed that when creating a new item in Blackboard while using Google Chrome, Google chrome warns that Blackboard has an out-dated version of Java? You can click to proceed anyway BUT every time you want to add an item you have to deal with this same warning dialog? I haven't noticed this happening in either IE or Firefox.

Christopher said...

@Pete - Try updating your java version in Chrome by going to http://java.com and clicking "free java download". Let us know if that helps with the issue. Thanks!

Unknown said...

Christopher,
Thanks for the suggestion. I went to the Java sight and had it check my version of Java. It says it's up to date. Could it be that Blackboard is running an older version of Java and that Google chrome is repeatedly complaining about this?
Thanks again,
Pete

Christopher said...

@Pete thanks for your reply.

Java actually runs in your browser (not on the Blackboard server itself).

Could you send a detail of steps you're taking to get the error and what the error is exactly? We'd like to look into this further. Thanks!

Send details to blackboard@neu.edu.

nweaver416 said...

I have found that the entire text and overall layout of blackboard is extremely tiny when using google chrome. The text is barely readable it is so small!

Christopher said...

@nweaver416 - Try going to the Blackboard website in Chrome, and then push the CTRL key and the plus (+) key to enlarge the font. (Command + plus on a Mac). That may help!