Boolean buttons messed up in Chrome and Edge – what now?

There has been a lot going on about this the past couple of days – especially on Yammer and social media. This post is merely to help spreading the information.

TL;DR

As a picture says more than a 1000 words – let me steal a picture from Natalie Karolak (follow her, if you don’t already – she’s THE BC Docs Librarian ;-)) from this thread on Twitter. Here is what you might have noticed:

As you can see – the checkboxes/sliders are moved to an awkward position.

The cause

The cause is well known: new updates from Chromium cause the rendering to be f..messed up. So if you have an updated Edge/Chrome (both browsers are based on Chromium), you come across this issue. Important to note here is that it is NOT a Business Central bug, but one in Chromium. BC is merely a victim here..

People are working on it

Both Microsoft and Chromium people seem to be aware of the problem, and are working on a solution. It is not completely clear to me what the short term (or even the long term) solution will be. To quote Microsoft:

The engineering team responsible is aware of the issue and working on a fix.

Microsoft

There is a Yammer thread you can follow here.

Also Chromium is aware of the issue, as you can read here.

Now, do know, this means multiple teams are involved. And since this is a problem that has something to do with the rendering of the CSS of the BC Web Client .. the only thing the Business Central team can do is either to wait for a chromium fix to be pushed to the stable builds of the browsers (which can take quite a while) .. OR to change this CSS of the web client. One downside would be is that this would only fix once upgraded to a new version of Business Central. Cool for SaaS, not so cool for OnPrem.

And judging from Duilio’s reply in the thread, it seems that a runtime change is exactly what we can expect from the Business Central team.

It will be a client runtime change (the real fix must be provided by chromium browser devs in Google and Edge teams) for SaaS. They are hardly working to make it happen asap in SaaS. It is trivial to say that this has the highest priority in Microsoft plate.

Microsoft

Workarounds

Luckily, there are workarounds. Multiple .. . Some of them are not so user-friendly, some a bit more .. none completely. So just see the below workarounds as a temporary solution to the matter. In our company, we’ll go for the first one – but I’ll list all known workarounds just that you’re fully aware of all possibilities (at least the ones I’m aware of).

Remark: the Business Central Universal client is also based on Chromium, so will also suffer from the issue.

Workaround 1: Use FireFox

Use a browser that is not based on Chromium. We are telling our users to temporarily use Firefox. To be honest, I’m not completely sure that everything BC related is actually working in that browser, although it seems to be fully supported. So .. why not? It could be even a permanent solution.

Workaround 2: Change the css, client-side

A pretty permanent workaround is to mess with the css client-side. Twitter user Pi came up with that.

As you can see: install the Stylus extension, and provide a css change to this site. This is what I added:

Although I’m totally not confident with css or this stylus-tool, it did do the work on a client-level.

Workaround 3: Change the css, server-side

MECA came with a rather permanent workaround for OnPrem customers, by editing the css file on the web client.

Just remove one property:

Source:

I did not try this, but it seems quite straight forward!

Workaround 4: Downgrade the browser

You could downgrade the Edge/Chrome executable to a lower version, but honestly, this would be something you would probably need to do every day until there is a fix (or disable updates, or disable group policies, or ..). For me, this isn’t really a sustainable workaround for users.

Workaround 5: Ad-hoc fix with the developer tools of the browser

Pretty similar solution than above – MECA came with a cool solution to fix it ad hoc in the developer tools of the browser as well. You can find a video on how to do that here.

Workaround 6: Use the “DEV” version of your browser

I heard this only works for Chrome, not for Edge – but if you use the “DEV-version” of Chrome, it’s also fixed. More here: https://www.google.com/chrome/dev/ . You could also use the daily build (canary), but as that is updated daily and generally unstable, other issues could arise. More info here: https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/. (Mentioned by Daniel on Twitter).

Workaround 7: Change the updated channel for Edge

As Daniel van den Hoek commented below, you can also change the update channel for Edge to Extended Stable:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-channels
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule

Not sure if this works the same for Chrome though, but there you could do the Canary-version .. .

Update!

As expected, Microsoft has foreseen a fix for SaaS, and some documentation for OnPrem.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.waldo.be/2022/06/29/boolean-buttons-messed-up-in-chrome-and-edge-what-now/

7 comments

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    • johannessebastian on June 29, 2022 at 9:45 am
    • Reply

    Disagree
    Workaround #1 is to simply use Canary
    Quick and easy, download and login and you are done 😉

    https://www.google.com/intl/da/chrome/canary/

      • waldo on June 29, 2022 at 10:05 am
        Author

      IF you use Chrome. Does not work for Edge (yet) 🤷‍♀️;-)

  1. Workaround 3 works perfectly for me onprem

    • Daniel van den Hoek on June 30, 2022 at 9:07 am
    • Reply

    As a workaround for now you can change the update channel for Edge to Extended Stable:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-channels
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule

    This will currently rollout Edge version 102.0.1245.xx

      • waldo on June 30, 2022 at 9:10 am
        Author

      Thanks, Daniel – I’ll add it on the list 👍

    • Hjalti G. Hjartarson on July 1, 2022 at 1:47 pm
    • Reply

    Thank you very much for the assistance on this. The official Microsoft fix in the bottom fixed this.

  2. Latest CU fixes this now. I made a #teardown blog for BC14 CU37 over this. There is also new VAT Clause handling in this CU.
    https://navurpo.blogspot.com/2022/07/cumulative-update-37-for-microsoft.html?view=classic

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