Migrating IE Web Apps to Mozilla

PabloHoffman writes "Have you ever wondered what would it take to make your (unfortunately) IE-only web app to work on Firefox?. IBM published an interesting article about migrating Internet Explorer specific web applications to Mozilla-based browers. It covers basic cross-browser development techniques, and some developing strategies for overcoming the differences between both browsers."

Comments

That's Easy!

[AKAImBatman]

Porting IE-only apps to Mozilla/FireFox is easy thanks to the extensive set of DOM and JavaScript debugging tools. It's going the other way that's the hard part. IE is completely unhelpful in diagnosing issues with document.addEventListener (a standard that IE doesn't support), or passing an event instead of using the stupid document.event, or showing you the DOM to find out where (or why) that specific DIV isn't showing up right.

Meh. Somebody needs to either fix IE, or take it out back and shoot it.

Re:Developers.

[Ingolfke]

True developers test for compatibility.

Not if the requirements document says build this app for IE only and don't worry about interoperability.

Re:The forgot something...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being IE-specific is the mark of lack of foreseight. I speak from experience, unfortunately. To be cross-browser compatable between the latest versions of IE and mozilla is exceptionally simple if a little care is taken upfront. Unfortunately massive, hand-written, IE-specific sites are likely not worth the cost to rewrite. Consider your lesson learned and do it right NEXT time, forget porting.

You guess wrong

[jag111]

I pity the pour souls who were forced to use your "huge and widely used" web app that was compatible only with IE. It's clear you didn't do your homework before starting the project. ASP.NET web apps do not require having the .NET runtime on the client any more than PHP web apps require installing PHP on the client. (read: they don't)

All of the native framework web controls have two distinct rendering modes. One is for "uplevel" browsers which includes any javascript/DHTML/etc. goodness that the latest browsers support. The other is for "downlevel" browsers and basically renders everything in something like HTML 3.2 compatibility. The server runtime detects which mode to use based on a section of the machine.config called browserCaps (essentially the .NET equivalent of browscap.ini). The default values stored in the machine.config basically only recognize 5.x+ versions of IE as "uplevel" browsers.

Updated versions of the browserCaps info can be found here:
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/browsercaps.asp
It should be noted you can choose to either replace the data in your machine.config to make it a system-wide update, or just add the same data to your app's web.config file.

On a related note, you can find an updated version of the original browscap.ini here:
http://www.garykeith.com/browsers/downloads.asp

IE only is unprofessional

[hexed_2050]

Websites that require IE only are very unprofessional IMHO.

If I have to use IE to use a website, my opinion about the company's website I'm on is usually changed. In this day in age, you have to be proactive, not reactive.