Server-side view state

There was a reason for adding the user-agent string to my ASP.NET error handling code, some errors are browser specific. One bug that has been biting me is view state getting corrupted. View state is a big chunk of base-64 encoded data that gets passed from the server to the browser in a hidden field. The browser does nothing with it (or at least it shouldn't) except pass it back to the server in a post-back. Unfortunately it seems some bug in FireFox causes the data to get corrupted for some of our pages which then causes our app to blow up when the data gets posted back. But more weirdly, there doesn't seem to be any mention of this bug when I Google for it. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this may have something to do with the geek community not liking to say anything bad about FireFox, but it's more likely that this is is just a very uncommon bug. Anyhoo, there seems to be a pretty good fix for this. This article describes how to store view state server-side. Not only does this solve the problem, it also reduces page size quite dramatically. Of course the downside is that server memory usage is increased.