Yesterday I blogged a little of the bad behaviour of my ASP.NET applications in the Firefox browser. As IE is under siege I just have to be prepared for a way out. My apps are indeed intranet apps, according to Shannon, the only thing place the cool ASP.NET apps are good for control properties are usable (imho there is no difference between a cool and a standard proerty) The moment my customers drops IE I'm in trouble.
Besides Firefox I also tried Opera. Opera has a nice feature, you can set the identity it will report to the server. It can pretend to be IE 4, 5, or 6 or a simple browser. My apps looked far better but Opera cannot work with Windows authentication. That is a showstopper. The night at the opera was a short one. Anyway, I don't like opera music and I didn't like all adds flying around. :)
As many people reported the main problem with FireFox is that asp.net is unaware of its capabilities. Shannon pointed to a good post by Rolando which lists good articles about browsercaps. Mitch Rupps's post lists well working caps for firefox. The point is where these caps should be included. You could do it in the machine.config and also in the web.config. I think you should do it in the web.config. As there are some incompatibilities it makes sense to do it in the web.config. It states “This app will look good in firefox”.
The incompatibilties of an asp.net app in firefox I found so far:
- Spacing controls in a template using absolute width does not work. I'm a big datalist fan, to emulate a grid I use the controls width to build columns. Does work in IE. Doesn't work in ff or opera. A datagrid looks OK.
- The gotdotnet treeview does not claim enough space. It is partly obscured by other controls on the page.
These things must be fixable.
As Joseph pointed out my blogs title suggests some involvement with Gecko, the engine of firefox. My Gekko originated in 1986 when I started Gekko Software in the pre web days and points to my previous career as a biologist. This cute little animal seems to have inspired other people as well. There is also a Gekko Software in Germany, they are in the gaming bussiness. And also with them I share no more than a name.
Peter 