Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - The Emancipation of Browsercaps.ini

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The Emancipation of Browsercaps.ini

Posted in ASP.NET.

Friends and readers, what’s the Microsoft story, do you think, around the BrowserCaps.ini file? The general feel amongst the public is very bad as it’s perceived (and correctly so) that Cyscape has totally dropped the ball maintaining this important file file. Now, there’s a grass roots group over at codeproject to keep the file updated: http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/browsercaps.asp. Kudos to them for pulling together an update.

If you've ever been confused why a panel renders as a DIV on IE and TABLE on FireFox, you need to update your machine.config right away.

Posted at 2005-10-19 05:42 PM by Scott
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"Better BrowserCaps file" (Curtis Swartzentruber) [Trackback]

Thursday, October 20, 2005 3:04:55 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Am I the only one that effectively turns off the uplevel / downlevel rendering crap? I'm not a big fan of that feature as it's caused me many more problems that it has solved. Given, the sites I tend to work on are standards-compliant / css style and I'm not really having to worry too much about browsers below win ie5.x, so maybe it's just that.

Does anyone have any great stories about the feature? Has it saved anyone work? Has it worked at all on a production site?

Ben Lowery

Thursday, October 20, 2005 10:45:41 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I find it can be extremely useful to be able to adapt to different browsers. But I had to update my browser caps.

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/archives/000206.html

That covers ASP.NET 2.0 which will be released this next month. In my case I was trying to fix Mac IE which seemed to be jumping sessions. Each time I would hit a page it would be assigned a new cookie so the shopping basket would just not work. I even tried just placing a dummy value in the session to force it to stick around. That did nto help so I found if I forced it to work without cookies it would work, so I updated the browser caps to disable cookies for Mac IE. Now we have a QA team spending more time on testing those issues but for now it is just being running in cookieless mode.

Brennan Stehling

Wednesday, November 23, 2005 10:37:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Thought I would add my recent experiences to this thread. I updated my browser caps when I read this post a month ago, and thought everything was cool. That is, until my Infragistics ASP.Net controls stopped working correctly under firefox. When I reverted my browsercaps back to the default settings, all the Infragistics controls started behaving again. I'm not sure who's "fault" this is, but I thought that other IG control users might appreciate the heads up.