ASP.NET browserCaps for FireFox and Netscape 7

When building and deploying ASP.NET applications, you may encounter - like me - that they works just fine using Internet Explorer, but may not look just as fine in other browsers. Including some of the modern browsers, like Mozilla FireFox, Netscape 7, etc.

The problem is that ASP.NET uses information from the machine.config file to detect the browser type, which is then available in Request.Browser (but also determines the expected capabilities of these browser types). Since the default machine.config of ASP.NET 1.1 is a bit older than say FireFox, this means that some modern browsers (and/or their capabilities) may not be recognised correctly.

The solution consists us adding an updated browserCap section to the machine.config file (if you can access that file - you may have to ask your ISP), or in your web.config file (for a project-by-project basis).

I've found a great place of information with a recent and good working browserCaps section at http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/ with the actual browserCaps entry from http://slingfive.com/pages/code/browserCaps/browserCaps_spaces.txt being used by this Weblog application. I can recommend it to anyone, as I'm no longer getting problems reported from FireFox and Netscape users!