iOS 8 / Safari 8 not working with ASP.NET AJAX-Extensions

Question

Our website suddenly stopped working when iOS 8 was rolled out. Every post-back from within an ASP.NET UpdatePanel leads to an empty page. It still works, if the user-agent is set to "Chrome" from within Safari 8 (on Mac).

I already tracked down, that some of the "ScriptResource.axd" and "WebResource.axd" files are not loaded at all. There is also an error telling "Sys.WebForms" is undefined (probably due to the missing script-files).

We are using ASP.NET 2.0 with AJAX-Extensions 1.0 (I know, quite outdated. But used to work or could be fixed until now).

Answer 1

Beware that this solution is only applicable to .NET version < 4.0

So here it is...

Working UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.57 Safari/537.36

Not working UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/600.1.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1 Safari/537.85.10

The problem lies in the major version-change to AppleWebKit/600. ASP.NET AJAX does not correctly recognize the new Safari 8 browser (also with iOS 8). It thinks, that there is no support for partial-rendering. I found it in those lines from "PageRequestManager.cs":

bool supportsPartialRendering = (browser.W3CDomVersion >= MinimumW3CDomVersion) && (browser.EcmaScriptVersion >= MinimumEcmaScriptVersion) && browser.SupportsCallback;

MinimumEcmaScriptVersion/MinimumW3CDomVersion are both 1. Request.Browser gave me the following result:

W3CDomVersion = 1.0
EcmaScriptVersion = 1.0
SupportsCallback = false

Even though "EcmaScriptVersion" has a strange value, the problem is mainly caused by SupportsCallback beeing false.

The bug lies in the "mozilla.browser" file that ships with ASP.NET (located somewhere in "C:WindowsMicrosoft.NET"):

<browser id="Safari60" parentID="Safari">
  <identification>
    <capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="60" />
</identification>
<capture>
</capture>
<capabilities>
  <capability name="ecmascriptversion"       value="1.0" />
  </capabilities>
</browser>

<browser id="Safari85" parentID="Safari">
  <identification>
    <capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="85" />
  </identification>
  <capture>
  </capture>
  <capabilities>
    <capability name="ecmascriptversion"       value="1.4" />
  </capabilities>
</browser>

<browser id="Safari1Plus" parentID="Safari">
  <identification>
    <capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="ddd" />
  </identification>
  <capture>
  </capture>
  <capabilities>
    <capability name="ecmascriptversion"       value="1.4" />
    <capability name="w3cdomversion"           value="1.0" />
    <capability name="supportsCallback"        value="true" />
  </capabilities>
</browser>

Everything newer than "Safari 85" was meant to be catched by the last definition. But due to a messed-up regular expression, "Safari 600" is falsly detected as "Safari60":

<capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="60" />

Should have been

<capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="60$" />

I resolved this issue by adding a custom file "App_Browserssafari.browser" to my application with the following content:

<browsers>
  <browser id="Safari60_bugfix" parentID="Safari60">
    <identification>
      <capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="^d{3,}$" />  <!-- At least 3 digits -->
    </identification>

    <capabilities>
      <!-- Same as in "Safari1Plus" -->
      <capability name="ecmascriptversion" value="1.4" />
      <capability name="w3cdomversion" value="1.0" />
      <capability name="supportsCallback" value="true" />
     </capabilities>
  </browser>

  <browser id="Safari85_bugfix" parentID="Safari85">
    <identification>
      <capability name="appleWebTechnologyVersion" match="^d{3,}$" />  <!-- At least 3 digits -->
    </identification>

    <capabilities>
      <!-- Same as in "Safari1Plus" -->
      <capability name="ecmascriptversion" value="1.4" />
      <capability name="w3cdomversion" value="1.0" />
      <capability name="supportsCallback" value="true" />
    </capabilities>
  </browser>
</browsers>