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Poor Netscape/Mozilla Support in .NET
An anonymous reader submits: "I use Microsoft's .NET Framework at my place of employment to create website applications for the general public. I have noticed a number of issues that can make web applications developed in .NET incompatible with Netscape and Mozilla." Read on below for his specific complaints; have you encountered the same incompatibilities, and can you suggest any workarounds?
"The most egregious issue I have run into is this bug in .NET framework, that can prevent posts (the facility for the web browser to send information to the server) in Netscape and Mozilla (all versions) because MS used Internet Explorer specific Javascript. Microsoft buried a mention of a hotfix addressing the bug shortly after the first Framework Service Pack. However, the latest Service Pack (SP2) came out several months later and it still does not contain the fix. The only way to obtain the hotfix is to contact Microsoft's paid support. ("In special cases, charges that are ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem" -- from the knowledgebase article). Keeping the patch as a hotfix that is not freely downloadable ensures that hosting providers will not have it installed.
A Unicode encoding issue in .NET can cause all fonts to display as squares instead of letters in Netscape 4. I am not saying that MS has to support NS4. I think the decision of whether or not to support Netscape 4 should be up to the developer, not Microsoft. MS describes a workaround in the knowledgebase article. (Anecdotally) all other web development environments I have seen allow proper code to work in Netscape without a workaround.
Standards-compliant websites utilizing most web-development platforms usually work fine in Netscape and Mozilla, even if the developer did not to test or develop for Netscape and/or Mozilla. However, Microsoft's .NET Framework inserts code and encodings into web applications that categorically break these browsers."
It's all accidental that they have issues with Netscape and Mozilla browsers...
I have noticed a number of issues that can make web applications developed in .NET incompatible with Netscape and Mozilla...can you suggest any workarounds?
Sure. Force everyone to use IE. Microsoft products are generally fairly intercompatible -- they just interoperate little or not at all with other products, particularly if it's inconvenient. If you're going to go partly MS (.NET), it's very painful to not go entirely MS.
The other alternative, of course, is to entirely ditch MS, but that's a much more controversial sort of decision, and could cost the decision-maker his job. Much safer and more reasonable to just throw a little extra company money at Microsoft and keep things working together.
[end sarcasm]
May we never see th
I had severe misgivings when I read that .Net generates its own HTML for some of its features, AND it was doing so in a browser specific way.
Suppose I wnat it to do something else?
I imagine that you could write your own control, but that would sort of defeeat the purpose of the elaborate architecture that MS touts as saving considerable development time.
Its a real honeypot and bear trap.
Microsoft is always trying to force us into using their own software for everything, even when they do not have a good solution and they make it very difficult to effectively use the products of other companies. Microsoft only makes people angry when they do things like this.
Microsoft does not have a solution for everything, nor does Sun, Apple, Novell, Oracle, or any other company. Interoperability and compatibility are essential and the easier it is for us to integrate one company's products with those of other companies, the more we like and will use those products.
If Microsoft would make their products more compatible, accept responsibility for security, and provide more flexible and less extortive licensing, it would go a long way toward making Microsoft the company many of us want it to be.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
The Web will be a a lot better off if everyone pretends that Netscape 4 never happened.
Let it go. It has done more harm than even Microsoft to Web Standards.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Woah there buddy, that's not true at all ... if all the online applications don't work in other standard browsers (Mozilla, Opera, NS6), then all the Linux users are cornered out of using them. So we have just created demand for Microsoft software, in order to use these online applications.
One company controlling the architecture of the web is a very, very dangerous thing. I can only hope that a Global Visual Language Standard is approved worldwide along with an open-source, GVL standard browser... so M$ doesn't corner out a tremendous amount of operating systems, user profiles, etc. etc. And what if you suddenly had to pay a fee to remove ads from the new version of MSIE xx.xx? Microsoft has already used its operating system and web browser to sell a tremendous amount of services and software (can you say MSN 8's fruition?).
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
Since Microsoft is nearly always part of the problem, I suspect it will be faster (and easier) to modify the Mozilla engine to cope with Microsoft's blunders than it ever would be to get bare adequacy from Microsoft. What obstacles would the original poster face in circulating a new version of Mozilla?
No, it only loses full compatibility with that particular web control, and not
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
The trick to notice is that the name that uses the colon is actually what is placed in the html element's "name" attribute, and the name that uses the underscore is placed int he html element's "id" attribute.
The "id" attribute must be unique for each page, but the "name" attribute doesn't. Since the "id" is unique later versions of MS DOM (not sure bout moz/netscape etc) allow you to access the html element from the root document object using dot notation. NS4 doesn't support this.
The work around dereferences the object as being part of the forms collection. The forms collection is always available to the root document object and is hashed by the elements name (and sometimes also id) attributes.
Hope that cleared it up for ya.
_Nobody_ should have to support NS4. Infact, I think we should all start making an effort to STOP supporting it to force the few crazy users who continue to use it to upgrade. Netscape 4 is obsolete, outdated, and its host of bugs are a bane on web developers everywhere.