Brennan’s Blog

Once the Beta 2 Framework was in place and the users were migrated I had to review the browser database. In Beta 1 it failed to recognize Safari and while that has been a small portion of the market, it is significant enough to make a difference. And this week a report shows that Apple marketshare jumped in the US from 3.7% to 4.5% in the last year. That is dramatic growth fueled potentially by the strength of the iPod as well as the new and very inexpensive Mac Mini. (I want one so bad!)

To correct the problem I tried to find documentation once again via the MSDN search in VS.NET 2005 but like in Beta 1, this useful information is still missing. There is even a new App_Browsers folder meant to allow you to place new browser definitions into your website, but without documentation on how to use it there is really no reason why Microsoft should bother adding that feature. (*rant*)

Without proper documentation I simply guessed at what could solve the problem. After a couple of hours of making logical changes and seeing no change I gave up. The next morning I remembered you must run "aspnet_regbrowers.exe -i" to register the update for the browsers database. You also must restart the web server running development websites in VS.NET 2005 to force it to reload the updated browser capabilities factory. I would just stop and restart VS.NET altogether to be absolutely sure you are using the update.

Finally, to make Safari work I changed mozilla.browser and added safari.browser and ran the register utility. The change effectively tells the Mozilla definition to ignore matches on Safari and to allow the Safari definition to match on version 1.2, 1.3 and any other unknown versions. I would like to make the browser definition to be more thorough but it seems to fully functional at this point. I am, however, open to suggestions on changes and will post any updates as I get them.