How can I get SSRS and Chrome to work together?

Question

Chrome is my preferred browser; I need to interact with SQL Server Reporting Services, though, and when I navigate to a report created with Report Builder (*.rdl file), in Chrome I get no contextual menu. When hovering over the report, it does "light up" (a yellow border is drawn around it) and a dropdown arrow appears in the NE corner, but clicking it does nothing whatsoever.

In IE, it works just fine. However, I really don't want to use IE if I don't have to.

Sharepoint has similar issues (things that can't be done in Chrome and Firefox work fine in IE). Do I just have to "bite the bullet" and use IE when interfacing with Microsoft products, or is there a way to use SSRS from Chrome?

Answer 1

The answer to this very much depends on the version of SQL Server Reporting Services being used, which you haven't mentioned.

In the upcoming SQL Server 2016 version, Chrome is a fully supported browser for interacting with Reporting Services.

However for earlier versions, the only non-IE browsers supported (or at least partially supported) are Firefox and Safari. Older versions support progressively fewer features for non-IE browsers.

This means unless you have SQL Server 2016, using Chrome for reporting services is going to mean compatibility issues. To work around this there are a couple of possible solutions:

1) In a corporate environment, consider using the Legacy Browser Support extension for Chrome - this requires Group Policy settings to force some URLs to open in an IE window.

2) Use the IE Tab extension in Chrome to render certain sites using the IE rendering engine, but inside a Chrome tab.