AWC: Minimum requirements

Hi all!

I'm posting this one out for mainly everyone, but especially on behalf of our new member brandon_g. I'm the new admin on his board and some people started complaining about avacweb chat not working on their computers. I suspect their browsers to be outdated, so I came up with this question... What are the minimum requirements for having AWC work in a browser? I detected no problems whatsoever while staying updated with the latest, so I can't possibly tell what their problem is. I know some browsers do have limitations (also by permissions) and one does need to install QuickTime 7 and the Windows Media Player for having sound work in chat. So, what I'm seeking is a list of browser versions and their minimum settings and plug-ins enabled to make AWC work. And perhaps we can find a minimum with all of your contributions here.

Thanks for your comments on / contribution to this post.

Samantha.

PS: As soon as this is complete, maybe it's an idea to get this shared on chat.avacweb.net, right?

My contribution: AWC does work with these settings....

OS version: Windows 7 and Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft IE version: 11.0.9600.17501
Mozilla FireFox version: 35.0
Google Chrome version: 39.0.2171.95 m

Thanks Samantha

So let's crunch this down a little: AWC is written purely in JavaScript. The /chatbox pages of forumotion forums do not use Flash, but use AJAX to load new messages. With this in mind, your browser itself allocates a certain fixed RAM requirement for having one tab open and keeping it alive and responsive. Usually this is anywhere from 50-100 MB of RAM required, depending on page size, add-ons loading and some others.

Now, AWC is minified meaning that the time it takes the browser's JS engine to load is minimal. It parses input and adds a layer above the standard forumotion chat, reading, writing and requesting HTML through AJAX. This is also not a huge task and shouldn't require all too much memory.

So, due to the way AWC works, I believe that the cause for this issue lies somewhere else, and with the possibilities left, these would be a) forumotion's server having issues or b) a user-defined chat or user hook is performing massive tasks in the background.

Seeing how on my forum the chat is having issues as well and how I do not have any hooks installed, I would guess that the cause for this is an issue on forumotion's side -- actually, I recall reading a thread where exactly this was said. I'll see if I can find it again.

But with this conclusion, AWC should run fine on any browser without inherent lag (of course factors like internet connection can cause lag, but we'll leave that aside). Required specs for running AWC are just about the same as for running your browser.

Hello,
Thanks for the reply, seeing as how forumotion has been latelly i would not be AT all surprised if the issue is their fault. Are you about nearly 100 perecent sure is not your issue. I am only ask this becuse i want to make sure before we launch a huge war over there?

This is only my assumption after looking at some of the facts. If you actually want to perform a network analysis, feel free to do so.

The requirements or more limitations of AWC lie with the browser and its js/css support essentially. Older browsers may see a weaker styled AWC if it doesn't support css3. As for js AWC makes use of things like sessionStorage and JSON parsing, and it's perfectly possible for people out there to still be using browsers which do not support these; however I have taken this into consideration when making AWC and it doesn't affect performance, it just negates some features.

So yeah really AWC can be affected by the age of the browser - but it would have to be really old to be fatal to AWC.
And if you've had the tab open with AWC open for hours you'll notice it running slower due to potential memory leaks that can occur from message hooks and refreshes.
Other than that - it can be FM server or my server purely having some downtime or slow time.

Wow! Good answer! Thanks @LG.

Part of your answer I figured. It's got to do something with the DOM, right? So, do you think IE 8 could have problems running AWC for instance?

Thanks LG!