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For ASP saying that would be idiotic.

But how many ASP.NET developers add a BrowserCaps section to their web.config files?

I would guess that almost no one does. After all they are developing in .NET

Scriptconverter

http://slingfive.com/pages/code/scriptConverter/

Webmasters that force IE sould be fired. in ASP.net there is such a thing as a web.config file, where you can use browsercaps to detect and render for firefox, opera, etc.. http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/ http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/browsercaps.asp if you use it, please give credit to Rob (@slingfive) Eberhardt because he did us a great service. cheers

You just need to add more browserCaps settings to your machine.config or web.config files to get better output on Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. You can find them here: http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/

You can set your target HTML schema (HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0, strict, transitional, whatever) as well, but exactly where escapes me at the moment. It's a project-wide setting somewhere.

You need to update your web.config or machine.config file by including a browsercap section. Check out Rob Eberhardt's page explaining this.

.NET is "dumbing down" the HTML it sends to FireFox/Opera, though.. do a comparison sometime.

Unless you've added your own sections to the machine.config, or followed the slingFive browserCaps update.. you're not getting the full benefit of the other browsers.

At least with .NET, it's still dependant on IE being used as the browser.

Huh? What a load of baloney. ASP.NET renders according to the machine.config's browser capability settings. Check out slingFive's BrowserCaps for FireFox/Safari/etc., which causes .NET to render compliant code for all major browsers.

Also, it is important to note that ".NET" means quite a few things.. .NET does not mean web-only. There are console .NET apps, form-based .NET apps, and web based .NET apps. There's also different languages that encompass .NET, such as C#, VB.Net, and J#.

It only sends down different HTML if you configure your application to do so. Try using updated settings in your web.config file...

http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/

With regards to the HTML problem, have you considered that it might be because of an outdated segment in your web or machine.config files?

I myself am a C# developer (win forms and web forms), and I initiall had a huge problem trying to test and use any sort of aspx web application in firefox. After poking around for a bit, it turns out that the .NET framework will generate two different kinds of html one for "uplevel" browsers (by default i think this is only MSIE 5+ and posibly netscape 6 but don't quote me on that last part).

Anyway, there is a section that you can place in you web.config or machine.config files (i assume you know the difference between the two) that details the browser capabilities of various browsers hence the name browsercaps. By default this section of the file is pretty useless, it will detect IE, some netscape and that more or less it. Maybe some mobile browsers for PocketPC as well. This can be updated, and i find that the information at This Link is extremley helpful. I have used the browsercap information from this site on a few production servers to get rid of some ugly issues with AbleCommerce and Firefox, and i have it on my development machine as well; the difference in rendering will suprise you. In short, I highly reccomend that every ASP.NET developer check this information out, and keep your browsercaps section up to date. It may not be a 100% effective solution but it does do an excellent job of getting rid of most of the problems you will have when using a non MS browser.

FireFox and Opera were not released at the time ASP.net was, thus it is not in the recongised browsers list of your machine/web config file. This means that IE can make no assumptions about what browser you've got coming at it, and except that it doesnt support CSS, Javascript and so forth, so it'll shove lots of pre 1997 looking html out.

You need to add the correct browser capabilties information to your config files, then all will be well.

Try http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/ for more information.

Alternatively, specific controls that are bothering you can have their rendering overwritten in a fairly trivial fashion.

You need to update the browser capabilities in the machine.config file to tell the webserver what the other browsers support.

Try here for some updated xml.

If you check http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/ it contains how to update your web.config to better detect other browsers and send out richer content.

I agree, treating all non-IE browsers as downlevel is pretty dispicable. But fortunately the workaround is easy. To get .NET to use HtmlTextWriter for other modern browsers, instead of Html32TextWriter like it usually does, you need to add a browserCaps element to the system.web element in web.config or machine.config. Here is a pretty comprehensive browserCaps that I've used:
browserCaps courtesy of slingfive.com