Firefox support in CHT

I spent a good deal of time working on the CHT product over the weekend.  I made some tweaks to the menu system and added a help system.  It works fairly well if I do say so my self.   I was running through a test and I found something interesting.  ASP.NET out of the box has very spotty support for browsers other then IE.  You probablly don't think this is much of a suriprise as #1 IE and ASP.NET are both MS products but from another perspective issue #2 is the adoption of IE.  It has an overwhelming market share and any company catering to the web market needs to look at its user base and see what the market is needing or wanting.  A product that works with IE is going to hit a large portion of the target.  Also most people using an alternative browser still have IE installed just in case (or b/c they can't get rid of IE ;>).

This brings me to the point of this post.  I have decided to postpone official support for Firefox until at least the next release of CHT.  I have been testing the product in both browsers to ensure the widest widest possible. 


Here are a few issues I ran into supporting Firefox:
  • ASP.NET considers all other browsers as down level, meaining that it renders tables instead of DIVs and some other annoying issues  This can be fixed with a browsercaps section in the web.config file.  Google on it.
  • ASP.NET client-side validation does not work on Firefox.  This is because of the validation script used by ASP.NET validation controls.  There is a work around for this.  It also involves the browsercaps issue mentioned above but you must also use custom validation controls of which there are a few out there.  A link to a great article on the topic.
So my alternatives are to use hacks in ASP.NET 1.1 or wait until 2.0 comes out with the official fixes for all this.  Considering the limited market share of Firefox and a foreseeable fix I think I will dealy official support for Firefox.  However I will continue to test against Firefox just to see what my CSS and HTML look like in another browser.  I will continue to use the browsercaps hack for correct rendering but I will have to leave cross-browser validation for another day.

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