Mosaic Vivarium helps facility managers and investigators make timely, intelligent and cost-saving decisions about laboratory animal resources. Get instant answers on cage density, mating productivity, colony aging, protocol/permit counts, per diems and more. With a secure Mosaic online account, you can take charge today, room-by-room, rack-by-rack, at your pace.
One of our customers has found that Chrome on a Mac (OS 10.10.2) did not respond to the Silverlight plug-in instructions discussed here http://mosaicvivarium.blogspot.com/2015/04/chrome-42.html
However, this same customer found a solution using the Chrome app shown below.
Meanwhile, we’re continuing our transition completely away from Silverlight.
Chrome (and Firefox) are phasing out support for “NPAPI” plug-ins. This includes things like Apple QuickTime, but most importantly for Mosaic users, Microsoft Silverlight.
With version 42 Chrome will act like Silverlight is not installed:
To correct this enter
chrome://flags/#enable-npapi
in your browser address bar and locate the setting shown below. Press “Enable”:
Now the link will read “Disable” and a “Relaunch Now” button will appear at the bottom of your screen. Press it:
Cage-side Assistant Silverlight functionality will be restored.
You can read more details here: http://www.chromium.org/developers/npapi-deprecation
In particular, read the April 2015 section: Google is making it “more difficult to navigate, as a means of discouraging NPAPI use by developers.”
The Mosaic team is making progress with the pure-web version of the Cage-side Assistant and expects to meet the September 2015 deadline for loss of browser support for Silverlight.
Additional reference: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3058254/
The latest versions of Chrome now require users to authorize Silverlight to run. By following the guide below you can eliminate repeated requests for authorization:
If you are using Chrome around version 37, such as this version:
you may find that wide worksheets in Mosaic (those with a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the grid) will slowly scroll themselves back to the left. This has just started with the introduction of recent versions of Chrome. We are working on a fix.
Meanwhile, we’ve also identified that this behavior does not occur if the browser is set at 100% zoom. You can check your zoom using the menu in the upper right:
Adjusting back to 100% seems to eliminate the unwanted scrolling.
Mosaic Vivarium does not use the open source “OpenSSL” package and is therefore not vulnerable to the Heartbleed exploit. Mosaic Vivarium servers (either hosted by us or at our customers’ facilities) use Microsoft web servers with Microsoft’s implementation of SSL.
You may sometimes see an error dialog:
If you click on Details you then see “breeze error: Error: Illegal construction – use ‘or’ to combine checks”:
This happens mostly when you first login and seems especially prevalent with the latest version of Chrome, version 33.
The message is a nuisance that poses no problems for your data: simply refresh the web page. We apologize for the inconvenience.
We are working hard to find the cause and fix it.
During a recent update to Chrome, Google introduced a built-in PDF viewer. Unfortunately, this does not have the control needed to properly print cage cards. There is a simple procedure to restore the previous behavior using Adobe Reader:
In the Chrome address bar, type chrome://plugins
Find a section that looks like this:
Disable the Chrome PDF Viewer and Enable the Adobe Reader so the settings look like this:
Done.
Note – there are always security considerations with browser plugins. Adobe Reader is widely used and from a trusted author. Nevertheless, you should take care to install recommended security updates for Adobe Reader as they become available.
