How do I detect what browser is used to access my site?

Question

How do I detect what browser (IE, Firefox, Opera) the user is accessing my site with? Examples in Javascript, PHP, ASP, Python, JSP, and any others you can think of would b

Answer 1

Comprehensive list of User Agent Strings from various Browsers

The list is really large :)

Answer 2

PHP's predefined superglobal array $_SERVER contains a key "HTTP_USER_AGENT", which contains the value of the User-Agent header as sent in the HTTP request. Remember that this is user-provided data and is not to be trusted. Few users alter their user-agent string, but it does happen from time to time.

Answer 3

It may be dependent of your setting. With apache on linux, its written in the access log /var/log/apache2/access_log

Answer 4

check out browsecap.ini. The linked site has files for multiple scripting languages. The browsecap not only identifies the user-agent but also has info about the browser's CSS support, JS support, OS, if its a mobile browser etc.

cruise over to this page to see an example of what info the browsecap.ini can tell you about your current browser.

Answer 5

You can do this by:
- looking at the web server log, OR
- looking at the User-Agent field in the HTML request (which is a plain text stream) before processing it.