Out of the box, ASP.NET 1.1 doesn't recognize FireFox, but FireFox is now probably the second most popular browser behind IE.  IE still has the market, and if you are just checking IE, you probably won't feel any pain, but when developing an app for the Internet, you should make sure that your site works and looks good in the popular browsers. 

Since ASP.NET 1.1 doesn't recognize FireFox, the built-in WebControls will render down-level html.  What that means is that every <div/> tag will be replaced by a single-cell table, and a host of other changes.  This isn't good because it will distort the layout of your page.

The good news is that ASP.NET 1.1 can easily be told of the capabilities of other browsers through the web.config file.  You can customize the regular expression used to evaluate the User Agent string, but if you quickly need to support FireFox as well as IE, paste the following into your web.config within the <system.web/> node:

    <browserCaps>
            <case match="^Mozilla/5\.0 \([^)]*\) (Gecko/[-\d]+)(?'VendorProductToken' (?'type'[^/\d]*)([\d]*)/(?'version'(?'major'\d+)(?'minor'\.\d+)(?'letters'\w*)))?">
                browser=Gecko
                <filter>
                    <case match="(Gecko/[-\d]+)(?'VendorProductToken' (?'type'[^/\d]*)([\d]*)/(?'version'(?'major'\d+)(?'minor'\.\d+)(?'letters'\w*)))">
                        type=${type}
                    </case>
                    <case> <!-- plain Mozilla if no VendorProductToken found -->
                        type=Mozilla
                    </case>
                </filter>
                frames=true
                tables=true
                cookies=true
                javascript=true
                javaapplets=true
                ecmascriptversion=1.5
                w3cdomversion=1.0
                css1=true
                css2=true
                xml=true
                tagwriter=System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
                <case match="rv:(?'version'(?'major'\d+)(?'minor'\.\d+)(?'letters'\w*))">
                    version=${version}
                    majorversion=0${major}
                    minorversion=0${minor}
                    <case match="^b" with="${letters}">
                        beta=true
                    </case>
                </case>
            </case>
        </browserCaps>

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Posted Wed, Jun 29 2005 1:44 PM by Jeffrey Palermo