AGOL Browser Compatibility

[JoeFlannery]

With which browser have you found the least number of issues when working in ArcGIS Online for Organizations?  Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox?

We have found IE 10 & 11 to be flakey.  Difficulties with adding secure services to the ‘My Content’ area; initial login fails then works at the second or third attempt; line features with two end vertices in the editing environment, and more.  Browser history/cache has been cleared with no change in behavior.  With Chrome (latest version), these issues do not exist or rarely appear.

We are also using SAML with ADFS for enterprise login to AGOL.  When we enable enterprise Single Sign-On, Chrome does not recognize SSO and AGOL can, therefore, not be accessed via a Chrome browser.  IE and Firefox (latest version) do recognize and work with SSO enabled.

So, we would like to use IE as our enterprise browser to access AGOL, but it behaves poorly and unpredictably.  The Chrome browser behaves better, but does not work when our enterprise Single Sign-On is enabled.  We have little experience with Firefox, but it appears to behave well and respects SSO.

Do you have any AGOL browser user experiences that you would like to share?

[HeathBrackett1]

Our agency uses IE 10 and Google Chrome.  Each browser works pretty well now using ArcGIS Online (we used to have IE 8 which was wrought with issues), although we tend to still recommend Chrome over IE.  We've done some testing with Firefox and generally think that it performs well, although it is not currently supported by our agency.

We are in the beginning stages of migrating our users to enterprise logins through ADFS.  We actually find that Chrome performs better than IE 10.  Users in Chrome are directed right in to the ArcGIS Online environment, while in IE 10 a separate tab opens and then IE prompts the user to close that window before being logged in to AGO.  In Firefox, the user is prompted for their ADFS credentials before being logged in. 

We will be doing some more testing with the initial round of users that we migrate.  We figure that we will experience a few hiccups along the way, but have decided to move forward.  I'm most nervous about losing content in the migration process from an old username to the new enterprise username since we don't have any mechanism for creating backups of the content in AGO. 

I'm very interested in hearing others' experiences.  Thanks for starting this thread.

Heath

[JoeFlannery]

Heath:

Thank you for your response.  We will continue to test various IE settings.

Regarding your migration to enterprise login with ADFS credentials, I have done it and this is how I migrated user items.

Log into AGOL as the organizational Admin.

Leave the users who have an "ArcGIS Account" in your organization.

Invite your users into your organization with "Send invitations to enterprise logins"

When your users are in as enterprise members, you will "Change Owner" of their map/data items from their old account to their new account.

Click on the Gear at the end of the "old" user login and choose Manage Items.

Click on the items in the user's Content area and choose the Change Owner option.

*This could be labor intensive if you have many users who have many map/data items.

Use the drop-down to find the new account for this user and click Move to transfer the items to the chosen location.

You can now Delete the old user account.

[HeathBrackett1]

Joe,

You can script this process to make it much, much faster.  Have you checked out PortalPy?  You can call the delete_user function and specify the new user that should receive the old user's content before deletion.  Just a few lines of code will take care of all of that.

Heath

[Reynaldde_Castro]

If your network is using a proxy you may have to set the compatibility view settings when using IE.  I have found that adding this fixes some IE10 issues.  Chrome still behaves a lot better than IE and I don't have to worry about browser issues at all.  Firefox does not authenticate with our proxy and usually asks me to login to our network.

Esri Accounts

[JoeFlannery]

Reynald:

I have not considered the Compatibility View Settings option.  I thought that was for web pages that do not render properly.  We are having functionality issues, however, I'll try anything at this point.

Some of our "in App" issues were solved when we added these URLs to our firewall exceptions list:

http://*.arcgis.com*

https://*.arcgis.com*

http://*.esri.com*

https://*.esri.com*

http://*.arcgisonline.com*

https://*.arcgisonline.com*

http://*.cloudfront.net*

https://*.cloudfront.net*

We have also spent time with >Internet Options >Security settings in the Local Intranet Zone and Trusted Sites Zone, but have found little joy as a result.

[JoeFlannery]

Another Observation:  Snapping during an Edit Session (hold down the Ctrl key) in a Web AppBuilder map or an AGOL map viewer map is not respected in IE 11, but it is in Chrome and Firefox.