Auto detect mobile browser (via user-agent?) [closed]

Answer 1

Just a thought but what if you worked this problem from the opposite direction? Rather than determining which browsers are mobile why not determine which browsers are not? Then code your site to default to the mobile version and redirect to the standard version. There are two basic possibilities when looking at a mobile browser. Either it has javascript support or it doesn't. So if the browser does not have javascript support it will default to the mobile version. If it does have JavaScript support, check the screen size. Anything below a certain size will likely also be a mobile browser. Anything larger will get redirected to your standard layout. Then all you need to do is determine if the user with JavaScript disabled is mobile or not.
According to the W3C the number of users with JavaScript disabled was about 5% and of those users most have turned it off which implies that they actually know what they are doing with a browser. Are they a large part of your audience? If not then don't worry about them. If so, whats the worst case scenario? You have those users browsing the mobile version of your site, and that's a good thing.

Answer 2

There's a brand new solution using Zend Framework. Start from the link to Zend_HTTP_UserAgent:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.http.html

Answer 3

There are open source scripts on Detect Mobile Browser that do this in Apache, ASP, ColdFusion, JavaScript and PHP.

Answer 4

Have you considered using css3 media queries? In most cases you can apply some css styles specifically for the targeted device without having to create a separate mobile version of the site.

@media screen and (max-width:1025px) {
   #content {
     width: 100%;
   }
}

You can set the width to whatever you want, but 1025 will catch the iPad landscape view.

You'll also want to add the following meta tag to your head:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

Check out this article over at HTML5 Rocks for some good examples

Answer 5

My favorite Mobile Browser Detection mechanism is WURFL. It's updated frequently and it works with every major programming/language platform.

Answer 6

Yes user-agent is used to detect mobile browsers. There are lots of free scripts available to check this. Here is one such php code which will help you redirect mobile users to different website.