Blackbeard...It's hard for me to even say the name without fuming into a lengthy, vitriolic rant about unenlightened administrators and graft. However, for those of us at Blackboard-monopolized and mandated universities, we often don't have a choice about using it. "The university is paying $500,000 a year for this, you better use it" seems to be the story at most places. To make matters even worse, we have to use Internet Explorer to properly access Blackboard's gradebook. To wit:
There is a known problem with the gradebook trying to produce too many table entries in the table sent to the web browser. IE will render the table as it receives data, while Firefox/Mozilla will wait for the data before rendering the table. It is a known bug, and should be fixed in the release we are installing December 20th.
This news has actually brightened my morning. At least I will be able to use my favorite free software browser to access the closed-source, proprietary scourge that is Blackbeard.
Let me say it once again. All software at public universities, IN PARTICULAR the learning management systems, ought to be free software (or open source, choose your terminology). It's unethical, irresponsible, and just plain stupid to pay for closed-source, proprietary software, no matter how "good" it is. I'll get off Barton's Soapbox (TM) now.
Opposite Experience
I'm usually one of the first to criticize Blackboard, but my experience is actually the complete reverse of this bug note. The Gradebook page is often very slow at it computes grades cell by cell, student by student, rendering the table piece by piece. Some faculty have complained of the Gradebook "hanging". When I show them the page on Mozilla/Firefox, they can see the page slowly rendering, computation by computation, and they soon understand the problem. I love to criticize Blackboard, but I don't think this is valid criticism. I have no problems viewing all parts of a Blackboard site with Firefox.
I don't think we are talking about any Microsoft-specific extensions here, I think we are just talking about the way different browsers render tables.
regardless
it's still MS-centric design. if the designers had used Firefox as their base in building the gradebook module (as many developers are now doing), or even had tested it well with other browsers, they would have fixed this issue before release.
Works better in Firefox for me
I maintain that the Blackboard gradebook works far better for me in Firefox than in Internet Explorer. Can anyone else confirm their experience with the gradebook in multiple browsers?