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Good morning all,

I recently started an entry level job creating web pages in ASP.NET/C#.

I've been getting along fairly well but when I began doing cross-browser testing on a site I just finished, I discovered that while the site renders fine in IE, only the master page is rendering in every other browser (FireFox, Opera, Chrome).

I'm sure i'm missing something trivial but I've googled around and cant seem to find a solution.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated and any code needed to assist in analyzing this issue can be quickly provided.

Thanks!

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noted the problem was solved but didn't include the root cause. For anyone hitting the same symptom — full master page renders in IE while content pages appear missing in Firefox/Chrome/Opera — the behavior usually points to a server- or markup-level difference between how IE is fed the page and how other browsers are fed it. The checklist below covers the common, verifiable causes and quick tests to isolate which one applies.

Check whether the browser actually received the content or if it was hidden client-side. Use the browser DevTools (Inspector/Elements and Network). If the HTML for the content is absent from the response, the server never sent it; if it’s present but invisible in the DOM, CSS or JS is hiding or removing it. Inspect the Network tab for the response headers — especially Content-Type and Content-Encoding. Serving pages as application/xhtml+xml (or sending different content types based on UA sniffing) makes browsers parse as XML and fail on the first well-formedness error, while IE historically behaves differently — that mismatch often explains "works in IE, broken elsewhere."

Server-side flow or conditional logic is another frequent cause. Look for server-side user-agent sniffing, Request.Browser checks, conditional comments, or early terminations like exceptions, Response.End/Server.Transfer calls or logging that stop rendering after the master page runs. Also sanity-check master/content wiring: ContentPlaceHolderID matches and content blocks are correctly used (this will produce the same symptom in all browsers, but it’s a cheap check). To debug: fetch raw headers with a simple curl -I or use DevTools, temporarily disable CSS/JS to reveal hidden markup, and enable detailed server errors or logging so exceptions don’t get swallowed.

These steps cover the typical root causes seen in cross-browser differences. If the original fix is posted later, adding it here will help others reproduce and avoid the same pitfall.

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Oh, and i'm using ASP.NET 2.0

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Nevermind, I figured it out.

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