I did. For shame, eh?

I have been playing with a new Vermont.NET user group website and using lots of new asp.net 2.0 UI features.

I put it up and quickly got a reminder from ASPInsider, Aaron Seet, (who I’m grateful to for checking) that there were some messy areas when he opened it up in FireFox.

I don’t, well didn’t, even have FireFox on my computer. So I downloaded it and saw the mess right away. I wasn’t sure how to fix it at first, but after looking at that page in the designer for a while, I finally saw the problem. I had DIV tags that had a default height in them. When the actual content made the div larger than that default height, I.E. made the adjustment. Firefox didn’t and the content hung over the bottom of the div into the element below it. I removed the height parameters and all was well.

While I was at it, I checked the html for XHTML compliance. You can do this when in source view by changing the drop down from it’s default of Internet Explorer 6.0.

I cleaned up my html with alt’s in my images and more. I had a few i.e. specific things that I left in  such as setting the non-xhtml img border parameter to “0” so that hyperlinked images don’t get a big ugly border around them.

I’ve discovered a few other things I’m doing on the site that don’t work in FireFox. For example

1. You can’t move ASP.NET 2.0 web parts around in FireFox. However, if you move them around in IE, the positions are stored to your user account and displayed properly in FireFox when you are logged in.
2. I have some groovy little popup divs that are driven by html and javascript. If you go to the site in i.e. you can see these in action. There are little question marks on the page. Hover over them and you will get info on the ASP.NET 2.0 (or other interesting) tool that is used in that section of the page.
3. I have a telerik r.a.d.panelbar on the book reviews page. That is awfully funky in FireFox. I’m sure I just have to change a few parameters and will deal with that after I get some client work done.

Bottom line is don’t assume that even .NET developers are so Microsoft-centric that they wouldn’t dream of using a non-MS browser. 😉 And don’t be so darned lazy. Look where it got me! Spending a beautiful Sunday afternoon working on my user group’s website. Okay, I’m kidding about the nice weather.

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