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

Now I understand!

[orthogonal]

So this is how "vertical integration" works!

(By the way, I have inserted HTML code into this post such that anyone who has not added me to his "friends" list cannot reply to this post.)

(By the way, if you decide to add me to your "friends" list, HTML code will be added to all of your posts such that only I and my "friends" can read or respond to your posts.)

(Why? Because I believe in the Free Marketplace of Ideas, so long as all of those ideas are mine.)

Two explanations

[Lumpish Scholar]

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." --Robert Hanlon ("Hanlon's Razor")

"Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run." --Microsoft Windows developers (circa early 1990s; quoted anecdotally)

Yes

[0x0d0a]

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]

.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.

Some people has asked

[jsse]

if MS is making an interoperative framework what more can you complain? Corps like IBM and Oracle when talking about interoperative issues they mean it - if you can't get Oracle work on AIX you can yell at both parties and they'll get it work. To them interoperable means profit. They hardly insist on one-platform solution when customers has their own business needs.

Frankly I don't see MS has that in their mind in the past when dealing with same issue. .NET, if it's done well, can bring MS' business to a new level, because low-cost(put down your torches please :), interoperable enterprise solutions is highly demanded. However, instances as such will well shattered our hope and MS is still having their own way in dealing with interoperability.

Can Mono help with this?

[fuzzbrain]

My experience with .Net is limited to playing around with mono a bit. It strikes me that this is one area where the presence of mono could be very useful. If Windows .net produces html & javascript that isn't cross-browser compatible developers can either switch over entirely to mono or perhaps just use the equivalent mono dll ( System.Web.dll? ) (which I presume will be made to produce cross-browser html & javascript) in place of the Microsoft one.

Just get new controls

[MobyDisk]

I recently took a .NET course offered by a Microsoft partner, e.magination, and the first thing they said about the ASP.NET is that you need to go out and get another set of controls. The ones that come with ASP.NET cripple under other browsers. There are lots of them out there if you search, and e.magination provides consulting services in that area. You might be able to contact them and see what they use (most likely for a fee).

since nobody else can answer your question

[Anonymous Coward]

I will. Don't use the asp.net controls. use a standard control with the runat server attribute set to true. you will then be able to declare variables in the code behind file to manipulate them in code.

Never use the built in validators. they're poorly written and don't work well.

In general, the asp controls work ok if they're simple controls. Never depend on .NET to accurately render something complicated.

Avoid the DataGrid control like the plague. Use repeater if you need to write a grid.

the built in ASP.NET controls work well if you use ie 6 on XP as a client, and degrade from there.

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.

Re:This makes no sense

[c0d3fu]

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?).

Learn to write your own .Net webcontrols

[Utopia]

A Unicode encoding issue in .NET can cause all fonts to display as squares instead of letters in Netscape 4

This is because of Netscape 4's faulty handling of UTF-8 characters not a .NET issue.
The default encoding in ASP.Net is UTF-8.
You can change the default in your globally in web.config or per response in your aspx page.

Too bad...

[mirabilos]

I just hit this page with MSIE (I usually browse
with Lynx, you know, but since I'm at a box with
IE at the moment...) and saw an ad for...

guess what...

Microsoft Visual Studio .net

Btw, did you ever notice .net in ROT13 is .argh?
There must be a hidden reason behind that *hint*

Microsoft Is Rarely Part of the Solution

[Eustace Tilley]

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?

Yes, but...

[DNAGuy]

You are right that many of the "webControls" are not cross-browser compliant. It's also true that some of the aspx headers may not include your preferred character-encoding, doctype, etc. The good news is, you can still take advantage of the rest of the framework, and save the webcontrols for IE specific projects. You can develop your own usercontrols and provide the same level of integration with the IDE. Also, the IDE is excellent about leaving your ASPX (html) code alone. In my opinion, at the very least, it's no harder to build cross-browser apps in Visual Studio.Net than it is in any other IDE.