ViewState invalid only in Safari
My first port of call would be to go through the elements on the page and see which controls:
- Will still work when I switch ViewState off
- Can be moved out of the page and into an AJAX call to be loaded when required
Failing that, and here's the disclaimer - I've never used this solution on a web-facing site - but in the past where I've wanted to eliminate massive ViewStates in limited-audience applications I have stored the ViewState in the Session.
It has worked for me because the hit to memory isn't significant for the number of users, but if you're running a fairly popular site I wouldn't recommend this approach. However, if the Session solution works for Safari you could always detect the user agent and fudge appropriately.
While I second the Channel 9 solution, also be aware that in some hosted environments Safari is not considered an up-level browser. You may need to add it to your application's browscap in order to make use of some ASP.Net features.
That was the root cause of some headaches we had for a client's site that used the ASP Menu control.