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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."
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.
.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.
Frankly I don't see MS has that in their mind in the past when dealing with same issue.
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).