Everyone knows, I’ve never been that big of a fan when it comes to ASP.NET WebForms. Instead of repeating my reasons here over and over again, just take a look at former posts of mine, for example here, here, and here. Well, unfortunately starting with today, there is one more reason for not using WebForms: A very annoying bug in IE8 that especially disturbs the way ASP.NET WebForms are working.

As those things are inherently difficult to explain, I decided to make a very short video (about 1 minute and 30 seconds) to show the strange behavior of WebForms and IE8 when opening a new browser window. In a nutshell, IE8 seems to lose its current state when a new page is opened for the first time, so it has to request the current page using GET from the server again. The odd thing is, doing the same thing a second time transfers the current state to the new browser window and no request is issued towards the server, so ASP.NET WebForms does not have a chance to react appropriately. This is especially an issue if the state and behavior of your web application depends on hidden fields and automatic framework handling of the forms collection – which is unfortunately the case in Microsoft’s primary web framework ASP.NET WebForms.

Check out the video (1:30 mins).