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We have some old in house apps that were written with asp.net 1.1. For various reasons they cannot be ported over to a more current version of asp.net and so (while we still need them) they must run at their current version. Obviously we have had problems getting them to work with modern browsers. I had been using a browser caps declaration in the machine.config file to fix some of these problems. A few versions ago, Firefox altered their user agent string and the browser caps section no longer detects the browser correctly. So now nothing works right of course. The only solution, make everyone use IE of course... Obviously this is not an ideal situation. We can continue on in this manner if we have to but I was curious if anyone had run into a similar situation and how they solved it (short of doing some sort of upgrade). I would be especially curious if anyone had solved this by modifying the browser caps file. I have tried to make adhoc modifications to the browser caps script with little success. If anyone is curious you can find more info on it here: http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/.

Thanks

oljones
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  • Can you update your `` config to match FF's new user agent string? – Jeff Oct 05 '11 at 20:50
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    What type of problems are you experiencing? browsercaps files are not updated by Microsoft so are not a good approach to browser compatibility issues... – IrishChieftain Oct 05 '11 at 20:53
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    I'm with IrishChieftain: browser caps are rarely the best approach. Also the "*obviously we have had problems..*" part isn't really obvious. There are plenty of old 1.1 apps with zero issues on modern browsers. What, exactly, are the problems you are faced with? – NotMe Oct 05 '11 at 21:03
  • I have tried to update the browser caps to pick up the new user agent string without any success. These applications include crystal reports components. Those don't render correctly in Firefox and "other" browsers unless you use something like browser caps. The elements and controls are hidden otherwise. I have no love for crystal either. Hopefully this will all be replaced soon. – oljones Oct 06 '11 at 12:25

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I had a similar problem, except it was a current ASP.NET version with an unpopular browser. ASP.NET 4.0 has issues rendering AutoPostBack controls inside of SeaMonkey.

As a short-term fix until we could fix it at the server, we had the user change the way their browser sends their user agent. In Firefox, you can download a plug-in to switch your user agent.

Obviously this is not a solution if your app audience is the public, but if your audience is a few select employees on an internal app, it may be a possible workaround.

Joe Enos
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  • This is not a bad idea really. But unfortunately our user base is not savvy enough to use it. It would be a definite non starter with our support people. – oljones Oct 06 '11 at 12:35