Problems with using Google Chrome or Safari with Moodle 1.9...and some possible solutions

Image via Wikipedia

If you are a fan of Google Chrome or Safari and a Moodle course teacher and designer, you may well be frustrated because the browser only shows a basic text box to edit with rather than a full HTML WYSIWYG editor. So, I've done some homework :-)

The answer to 'why' (from Mauno Korpelainen sourced from here): "The reason is simply that poor, old HTMLArea (default editor of moodle) together with old settings in moodlelib.php:

• /lib/moodlelib.php checks if browser is Fire Fox or Internet Explorer and does not allow other browsers to use editor
• /lib/editor/htmlarea/htmlarea.php does not allow Chrome to render editor"

Image via Wikipedia

I discovered some description of fixes (although I can't vouch that they'll work):

1. This blog post gives a non-technical and a technical fix: Making Moodle work better on #Chrome browser
2. This is the solution where you use this patch to update your Moodle server to support Chrome and Safari - but obviously only useful if you have access to the Moodle server (or the folk who look after the server): http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-16336
3. And this, is a more techie, down and dirty, but probably really effective, fix (from Miles Berry sourced from here)

"Getting Chrome to tell Moodle it's Firefox appears to work; on a Mac one can do this via the terminal on a session by session basis, under Windows you can pass the necessary --user-agent option via properties.

On a Mac, open the terminal and type (or paste):

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20091218 Firefox 3.6b5

I still get an annoying 'Mozilla < 1.3 beta is not supported' pop-up, but HTML area and AJAX then do work."