.NET 1.1 browserCaps

I’ve been working with a series of Panel controls to hide and show various sections of a page. Since I’m actively trying to validate the pages, fix errors, and make sure it looks the same between IE and Firefox I happened to notice that the Panel control rendered as a table in Firefox instead of div, which it does in IE. This, of course, pissed me off to no end. So I had to find out why.

It is all because of the wonderful machine.config browserCaps section…which has never been updated since the 1.1 framework was released. It controls if .Net uses the HtmlTextWriter (HTML 4.0) or the Html32TextWriter (HTML 3.2) based on the browsers user agent and some regex magic. Of course Firefox, pretty much all Gecko based browsers, and Apple’s Safari (AppleWebKit) are not included in any of the definitions so by default it uses the Html32TextWriter.

Through a little web searching I’ve found a good section to add into the web.config that adds support for Firefox.

Big thanks to Rob Eberhardt and Chris Maunder, Owen Brady and others

Code below just for my sanity.

<browsercaps>
 
	<!-- GECKO Based Browsers (Netscape 6+, Mozilla/Firefox, ...) //-->
	<!-- Edited by Owen Brady:6-12-05 -->
	<!-- Edited by Owen Brady:10-07-05 -->
	<case match="(Gecko/[-d]+)">
		browser="Mozilla"
		cookies="true"
		ecmascriptversion="0.0"
		frames="true"
		isColor="true"
		javaapplets="true"
		javascript="true"
		majorversion="${major}"
		maximumRenderedPageSize="20000"
		minorversion="${minor}"
		preferredImageMime="image/jpeg"
		screenBitDepth="32"
		supportsDivNoWrap="false"
		supportsFileUpload="true"
		tables="true"
		type="desktop"
		version="${version}"
		<filter>
			<case match="Gecko/(?'Gecko'd+)">
				BrowserBuild=${Gecko}
			</case>
		</filter>
		<filter>
			<case match="rv:(?'version'(?'major'd+)(?'minor'.[.|w]*))">
				majorversion="${major}"
				minorversion="${minor}"
				type="Mozilla${major}"
				version="${version}"
				ecmascriptversion="1.4"
				maximumRenderedPageSize="300000"
				preferredImageMime="image/gif"
				supportsCallback="true"
				supportsDivNoWrap="false"
				tagwriter="System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter"
				w3cdomversion="1.0"
				<filter>
					<case with="%{version}" match="^1.[4-9]">
						backgroundsounds="true"
						css1="true"
						css2="true"
						javaapplets="true"
						maximumRenderedPageSize="2000000"
						preferredImageMime="image/jpeg"
						screenBitDepth="32"
						supportsMultilineTextBoxDisplay="true"
						type="Mozilla${version}"
						xml="true"
					</case>
				</filter>
				<filter>
					<case match="Gecko/d+ Firebird/(?'version'(?'major'd+)(?'minor'.d+))|Gecko/d+ Firefox/(?'version'(?'major'd+)(?'minor'.d+))">
						backgroundsounds="true"
						css1="true"
						css2="true"
						javaapplets="true"
						maximumRenderedPageSize="2000000"
						preferredImageMime="image/jpeg"
						screenBitDepth="32"
						supportsMultilineTextBoxDisplay="true"
						xml="true"
						version=${version}
						majorversion=${major}
						minorversion=${minor}
					</case>
				</filter>
			</case>
			<case match="m(?'version'd+))">
				version=0.${version}
				majorversion=0
				minorversion=${version}
			</case>
		</filter>
		<filter>
			<case match="^Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/(?'version'(?'major'd+).(?'minor'd+).(?'revision'd+))">
				browser=Galeon
				version=${version}
				majorversion=${major}
				minorversion=${minor}
				revisionversion=${revision}
			</case>
			<case match="(Gecko/[-d]+)(?'VendorProductToken' (?'browser'[^/d]*)([d]*)/(?'version'(?'major'd+)(?'minor'.d+)(?'revision'.d+)(?'letters'w*)))">
				browser=${browser}
				version=${version}
				majorversion=0${major}
				minorversion=0${minor}
				revisionversion=0${revision}
			</case>
			<case match="(Gecko/[-d]+)(?'VendorProductToken' (?'browser'[^/d]*)([d]*)/(?'version'(?'major'd+)(?'minor'.d+)(?'letters'w*)))">
				browser=${browser}
				version=${version}
				majorversion=0${major}
				minorversion=0${minor}
			</case>
		</filter>
		<filter>
			<case match="Phoenix" with="%{browser}">
				browser="Firefox"
			</case>
			<case match="Firebird" with="%{browser}">
				browser="Firefox"
			</case>
			<case match="Mozilla Firebird">
				browser="Firefox"
			</case>
			<case match="(No IDN) Firefox">
				browser="Firefox"
			</case>
			<case match="Netscape6" with="%{browser}">
				browser="Netscape"
			</case>
			<case match="CS 2000 7.0" with="%{browser}">
				browser="CS 2000 7.0"
				version=7.0
				majorversion=7
				minorversion=0
			</case>
		</filter>
	</case>
 
</browsercaps>

John