Which Browser should I use to run Windchill 10.1

[DamianCastillo]

I am currently testing Windchill 10.1 and getting ready for implementation. I wanted to know which browser I should use to work best with Windchill 10.1 and Java.

I use Chrome for everything but I was not sure if IE or Firefox had any advantage with Java running smoother.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

[BineshKumar1]

PTC has released a browser comparison Technical Brief

[avillanueva]

Document is 2 years old. They should revise it.

[lmouchard]

Current version of the file is dated in June 2015:

http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/125513/en/WindchillWebBrowserComparisonTechBrief.pdf

[DamianCastillo]

I do appreciate the link to the document but it's so old, I can't use it to make a decision. I will stick with IE10 for now, but I was running it on Firefox and Chrome just fine.

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[bclark-2]

Damian,

We just finished our own testing with Windchill 10.1 M030. Internet Explorer 10 does not work. It constantly crashes making things difficult to say the least. We are currently using FireFox, as this was the most stable and crash free.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Brian

[JeffStevenson]

I use Chrome for Windchill 10-10.1. If I'm having to go back to WC 9, I'll use IE. I can't recall having a problem with any features using Chrome/WC10.

That being said, I still keep multiple browsers installed just in case. You can always switch to IE, FF if you find certain features do not work as well. I find it to be good practice on any web applications.

[DamianCastillo]

In Reply to Brian Clark:

Damian,

We just finished our own testing with Windchill 10.1 M030. Internet Explorer 10 does not work. It constantly crashes making things difficult to say the least. We are currently using FireFox, as this was the most stable and crash free.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Brian

Are you using the following config command?

windows_browser_type mozilla_based_browser

I figured if you are having issues with IE that the internal browser which uses the IE Engine may give you problems as well or is this different?

Can I keep the internal browser in Creo as IE but use Firefox as the stand alone browser?

I prefer Chrome and may choose this as my stand alone option.

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[DonSenchuk]

We're on 10.1. Our users generally have the capability of choose which browser to use. I've seen no isues on IE9 and FF. Several use Chrome, I didn't hear of any problems until they tried to launch Creo View.

In Reply to Damian Castillo:

I am currently testing Windchill 10.1 and getting ready for implementation. I wanted to know which browser I should use to work best with Windchill 10.1 and Java.

I use Chrome for everything but I was not sure if IE or Firefox had any advantage with Java running smoother.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

[cc-2]

Hi

I would first check what your company IT policy is. Can any user install any webbrowser ?

Could you have other systems requiring a particular version of a particular webbrowser ?

As said above by someone else. ProductView is not always compatible with other webbrowsers.

Is the fact that Chrome display certain pages more quickly than IE a good enough reason when certain functionality (maybe not often use) will not work with Chrome.

Personnally, I use Chrome only for certain tasks but I know the risk I take, sometimes windows get frozen and I tend to clear Chrome's cache a lot more often than with IE.

[AL_ANDERSON]

Here are the answers to these questions at Solar Turbines.

Can any user install any webbrowser ?
No. While many users are capable of installing their own browsers, our
technical support will not support any Browsers others than those approved
by IT. Moreover, most users do not have adequate PC permissions to
install their own browser. Our company support Internet Explorer 8.0 and
9.0, as well as Chrome (a recent addition to supported browsers, only this
year). Our Windchill support team has only tested and will therefore only
support Internet Explorer 8.0 with Google Chrome Frame (necessary for BOM
performance in Windchill 10.0) and Internet Explorer 9.0 without Google
Chrome Frame (the Chrome Frame with 9.0 had too many problems, and the
performance improvement with Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer 9.0 is not
as significant as with 8.0). We want to move users to Chrome, but we have
not had time to fully test it with all of the out of the box functions we
need, as well as with all of our reports and other site-specific
enhancements.
Could you have other systems requiring a particular version of a
particular webbrowser ?
Yes. There are a few cases where we make exceptions for specific reasons.
In fact, there is one custom Windchill 10.1 report that displays so much
data that we force them to use the otherwise unsupported Chrome Browser
JUST FOR THAT REPORT, since that report displays minutes faster in Chrome
than IE 8 or IE 9. We have a few other applications that require some
other browser, but not very many, and it is always for reasons of
performance.
As said above by someone else. ProductView is not always compatible with
other webbrowsers.
We would never try to support all browsers. We will test a certain
configuration of browsers and support those configurations, only.
ProductView works with configurations that we support.
Is the fact that Chrome display certain pages more quickly than IE a good
enough reason when certain functionality (maybe not often use) will not
work with Chrome.
In general, no. However, as I mentioned above, in extreme cases (like our
massive custom report that runs many minutes faster in Chrome), we do this
just for that report and only for those very few users who use that
report. We would never try to do this for a large body of users.
Al

[DamianCastillo]

We don't restrict users from what Browser they can run or from installing applications on their workstations.

I simply want to know which browser is best for Windchill 10.1 so that I can let all my Engineers know which one to use.

I also wanted to know about the embeded Creo browser. My understanding is that it uses the IE engine. Is it OK to leave this default broswer alone? My users will mainly access Windchill through the embeded browser anyway.

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[AL_ANDERSON]

"Best" depends on how you measure the relative benefits of supportability,
security, performance, ease of use, interoperability with other
applications like MS Excel, compatibility with other websites and web
applications besides Windchill, etc. etc.

I know that PTC people typically use Firefox when doing product demos. If
Firefox is "best" for PTC demos, then I would guess it is generally
"best" all around unless you have some local reason to use something else.
For us, our corporate security controls and other IT-process requirements
restrict us to a few validated, maintained browsers -- and Firefox just
isn't one of them.

As for the embedded browser, there are some pros and cons to each of the
available options (IE and mozilla). You should test them both yourself on
your own data set to figure out which one you like. In our case, we found
that we don't like the few problems we found with the mozilla embedded
browser more than we don't like the few problems we found with the IE
embedded browser, so we use the IE embedded browser. I cannot enumerate
exactly what those problems are, however, since they change over time, and
we have not revisited that decision in over a year - so things might be
different in the newest version CREO.

I'd be curious to know how many people on this distribution use the
mozilla embedded browser with some version of CREO instead of the IE
embedded browser, like we use.

Al

[DamianCastillo]

Albert,

Thank you for the straight forward response on this. I think we will go with Firefox for the stand alone option since our VAR also used it when they conducted our training and I will just keep the default IE option for the embedded browser in Creo.

Let's see how this works for us.

Thanks again

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

[doehr]

Hi there,

We are currently on PDM 10.1 M040, and force the use of I.E 10. There is a second part to this, you also have to consider your Java version; in this configuration we've had to hold everyone to Java 7.51.

I have directly seen problems with using Chrome at least when it comes to file editing. Our most notorious (and somewhat hilarious) example; in Chrome, when creating a new Document object type I've seen it create that Document...and 450 duplicates. Simultaneously. That took me a while to clean up . And our other IT members have mentioned various general problems with Firefox including its memory usage, so we didn't bother with it either.

So IE 10 for us.

[STEVEG]

We are on PDMLink 10.1 M050.  We are starting to use IE 11 more and more.  It is supported by PTC on this version and build but I don't know off-hand about previous builds.  We also are currently on 2 different versions of Java.  Version 6 Update 38 or version 7 Update 76.  They both work.  We started out with 6 U38 for everyone when we went to 10.1 M040.  Then since we went to M050 I did some testing of several different Java versions and decided on 7 U76.  The only thing with 7 is it displays a dialog box asking you to Run or Updated.  Annoying but manageable.  On the upside I was having problems with showing the workflow in the template administration.  It would work on the icons the first or second time you try to open one but after that it wouldn't.  Java 7 fixed that for us.