GWT - Hosted Mode Gotcha in Windows

I ran into a small gotcha while running a GWT application I am working on in hosted mode. Usually I am developing my application in hosted mode but for quick stand-alone deployments I also need to deploy the application to a dedicated servlet-container. Since the default settings cause the application to compile rather slowly, I have been trying to speed up GWT compilation times (Using GWT 1.7) by compiling against Firefox only (My browser of choice).

To achieve this I set the following property in my GWT module's *.gwt.xml file:



Well, as it turns out, this caused me quite some pain in hosted mode. I did not realize that the aforementioned setting affects hosted mode. I new that under Windows Internet Explorer (IE) is the default browser but always assumed it only affects fully compiled GWT code - not code running in hosted mode. That was a painful lesson - It caused some rather obscure errors in hosted mode and nowhere were I able to find explicit information regarding this issue.