Issues with Internet Explorer - do a browser check in the plugin?

[krautsource]

Hi all,

Just ran a few tests with IE10 on Windows7 and IE8 on WinXP... no good.
E.g. generating a key pair just doesn't work at all, neither does sending an encrypted message. Some other operations do work, but are very very slow.
This can all be traced back to openpgpjs, looks like IE support either isn't quite there yet or not really feasible.

I guess we should at least mention this in the documentation / FAQ, and maybe even do a browser check in the plugin to warn users?
Perhaps #99, #101 and #116 are related to this.

[niklasfemerstrand]

This can all be traced back to openpgpjs, looks like IE support either isn't quite there yet or not really feasible.

More specifically this is traced back to window.crypto.getRandomValues. Internet Explorer supports this since version 11. See browser compability here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window.crypto.getRandomValues

Added it to the FAQ.

[niklasfemerstrand]

#101 is Firefox 21, so it should be irrelevant. Waiting for response on #116, most likely outdated browser.

Browser detection, hm, meh... We could debate that it's a feature that it fails silently. Personally I think it's a bit of a paradox that security oriented software supports outdated software, especially in terms of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows XP, which are both unsupported by the vendor(!) for years.

[krautsource]

Personally I think it's a bit of a paradox that security oriented software supports outdated software

I fully agree and I don't see much of a need for the plugin to support such software. But I think we should inform the user as to why encryption, key pair generation etc. is not available to him/her: simply because of the browser and not because of user error, server problems, a bug in the plugin or what have you.

[niklasfemerstrand]

ACK :-)