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

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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:\Windows\Microsoft.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="\d\d\d" />
  </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_Browsers\safari.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>

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