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."

Comments

.Net

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:.Net

[RupW]

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.

It does it in a per-browser way. Its intention is understand and exploit advanced features of your browser.

Yes, MS can do this better for IE than anything else because they control it. It'd be irresponsible of them to start making assumptions about what Mozilla does / doesn't support without talking to the Mozilla folks and some heavy QA.

Presumably this isn't (yet) in their commerical interests.

Even if you ignore the .NET controls, you're still left with an excellent business-friendly replacement for .ASP.

Supporting Netscape 4

[DarkVein]

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.