Chris Schuld's Blog

Pablo Colla says:

Come on! I get “You have Firefox….” message even if I am on IE.

Pablo Colla says:

Hi Chris,

This is the User Agent I get with IE:

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; InfoPath.2)

Miguel Pereira says:

Hi !
I’m a portuguese. So, sorry my bad english

I try this script and not work with google chrome.

it’s only me ? :S

[]

Michael Therrien says:

Well then, I guess it has nothing to do with this script. That’s odd. I never got this before…
Guess I have more work to do!

Draugen says:

Very usefull code, saved me from a world of hazzle…
Only one thing that puzzle me is the typical use example which to me seems to be a faulty if sentrence. Too me it looks like it will type out the Firefox message whenever you are not using the Firefox greater than 2.0 rather then when you are actually using it?

robin says:

Just another question: What’s the reason for having both BROWSER_IE and BROWSER_INTERNET_EXPLORER? Seems to me that BROWSER_IE works, BROWSER_INTERNET_EXPLORER doesn’t, at least with IE7.

Damien says:

Hello dear mr Chris, I finally tested its excellent script and it works very well. In addition to thanking you, I wish them a question, perhaps not relevant: it is aware of a hybrid solution between php and javascript for the approval of the video resolution? I found several js script, but of course all suffer the problem of possible disabling js from the client user. Finally, I apologize for my not perfect English, are Italian.

Violative says:

I will verify and retry.

trixmasta says:

Hi, how do you get the browser name, and put it in a variable?
Thats the only part im confused about.

Thanks

David says:

Hi Chris.
I think the “Typical Usage” is wrong becauce of the “if( !(“.

Adam says:

Thank you very much for this! It’s great! However, the “Typical Usage” is still wrong… “>= 2 ) )” has an extra closing parenthesis.

Almog Baku says:

Thank you a lot!

Almog Baku,
Israel.

P.S the class doesn’t detect Avant Browser..

David says:

I found the problem.
The Ant.com toolbar has fouled up my User Agent

How to repair the User Agent
1. Type “about:config” in the URL bar from Firefox and hit Enter
2. Look for “general.useragent.extra.firefox”
3. Right-click that preference and select Reset
4. Restart Firefox – Done!

Raymond says:

Hi Chris,

Good day!

Could you by chance add “iPod” for devices to detect?

Hoping for the implementation.

Max says:

Why do I get a bunch of **s when I do echo($browser->getBrowser());

I am trying to just get the browsers name, but it gives me

** ** ** ** ** ** Firefox

Thanks!

Max says:

Nevermind. This is what I did to get what I wanted.

require_once(‘Browser.php’);
$browser = new Browser();
$thebrowser = ereg_replace(“[^A-Za-z]“, “”, $browser->getBrowser());
$ver = $browser->getVersion();

echo “$thebrowser $ver”;

Firefox 3.0

Rich Nicholls says:

Very nice. Just what I needed.

Do you have any plans to add support for mail client user agents? I’m currently using this to get a list of what browsers the recipients from our mailing list are using when they load our emails, but mail clients such as Mac Mail or Blackberry are reported as ‘unknown’. Not exactly what this was intended for, but I’m just interested.

AlexV says:

It would be nice to detect major search engine crawlers (like Google Bot) and the W3C Validator bot too… This way when we validate our site or when our site is indexed, some content is fetched by the bot.

Not really important, but would be a “nice to have” feature

I found this link that might help for the W3C:
http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/W3C-checklink/

I also have a question… Is this script will continue to work with PHP 6 once released? Don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t, but just want to check…

AlexV says:

IS there a way to detect Netscape versions? I know it’s dead, but my website still support it (7.2 and up)…

Moises Zaragoza says:

i just upload browser-v1-3.zip – v1.3 and i am getting

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in Browser.php on line 79

my code is

getBrowser() );
?>

Justin says:

Nice work man. Really good class. I’ve used it in some of my work and I’m very pleased with the results. I hope you continue to update the browsers

John says:

What does egeg(’308|425|426|474|0b1′, $var) do on line 339? $var is also undefined.

Olivier says:

Hi Chris, great script you have here. I was wondering if you were planning to add the os version detection, like distinguishing windows xp from vista

The other script I found is this one, http://techpatterns.com/downloads/php_browser_detection.php , which does detect the platform version, but the whole script is very messy and the way to use it is not as practical as yours

Anyway, I might give try at upgrading yours with this functuionnality if you don’t mind

Jean-Jacques says:

Hi there,

How would I implement if I want the detection to result in routing the user to another page specifically, based on the specific browser?

I’m a noob obviously.

Thanks!

cristi mihai says:

my best regards man . great works. thanks

Tim says:

I’m now using Daniel Lang’s version for PHP4, but still getting the same errors I had when using the PHP5 version.

Using different bits of code from this page give different errors, for example:

require_once(“Browser.php”);
$browser = new Browser();
if( $browser->getBrowser() == Browser::BROWSER_FIREFOX && $browser->getVersion() >= 2 ) {
echo ‘You have FireFox version 2 or greater’;
}

gives

Fatal error: Undefined class constant ‘BROWSER_FIREFOX’ in /splash.php on line 7

Any ideas?

Nayan says:

Thanks a lot,
Your class file is very helpfull.

I am so happy to get it.

Topher says:

Thanks for the code. For BlackBerry:

protected function checkBrowserBlackBerry() {
  $retval = false;
  if( eregi('BlackBerry',$this->_agent) ) {
     $aresult = explode("/",stristr($this->_agent,"BlackBerry"));
     $aversion = explode(' ',$aresult[1]);
     $this->setVersion($aversion[0]);
     $this->_browser_name = self::BROWSER_BLACKBERRY;
     $retval = true;
   }
   return $retval;
}

Enhancement suggestion is to add isMobile property. It would make it easy to know when to optimize for small real estate screen, spotty javascript support, etc.

Thanks for the hard work,
TC

Daniel Lang says:

@Rob

Did you check to make sure IE8 wasn’t running in compatibility mode for IE7 ?

Rob says:

Right after I said that I checked again. It seems the default is to “Display all websites in Compatibility View”. Once I unchecked this it shows correctly as 8.0. Interestingly enough, when it compatibility mode the rendering was completely different then when rendered in the actual 7.0 version. .

Thanks for the tip Daniel, and thanks again for the updated script Chris and all who have added components.

-Rob

Daniel Lang says:

@hi

Goto http://chrisschuld.com/proj/Browser/useragents.txt to get a list of known User Agents, you should be able to test out a few different 5.x and 6.x User Agents for IE.

Not sure exactly what you are trying to achieve here however remember to remove the \r\n at the end of the User Agent string you supplied. If you still have issues with flash try posting on a Flash related website or update your Flash Player plugin for IE.

Nugraha says:

huy chriss

i got a problem with opera mini in phone
i use this code

$browser = new Browser();
$thebrowser = ereg_replace(“[^A-Za-z]“, “”, $browser->getBrowser());
$ver = $browser->getVersion();

echo “”;
echo “$thebrowser $ver”;

but this script detect opera version 9.60
actually i use opera mini version 4.1

please help me to correct this

Nick says:

Great script, does exactly what I need. Thanks for spending the time to put it together.

Adam says:

Is there any plan to update this for PHP 5.3.0?

Jeff Flesher says:

Add isRobot function
Add to Constructor
/* The most common ones. The rest alphabetically. */
$this->_robots = array(‘Googlebot’, ‘msnbot’, ‘Slurp’, ‘Yahoo’,'Arachnoidea’, ‘ArchitextSpider’, ‘Ask Jeeves’, ‘B-l-i-t-z-Bot’, ‘Baiduspider’, ‘BecomeBot’, ‘cfetch’, ‘ConveraCrawler’, ‘ExtractorPro’, ‘FAST-WebCrawler’, ‘FDSE robot’, ‘fido’, ‘geckobot’, ‘Gigabot’, ‘Girafabot’, ‘grub-client’, ‘Gulliver’, ‘HTTrack’, ‘ia_archiver’, ‘InfoSeek’, ‘kinjabot’, ‘KIT-Fireball’, ‘larbin’, ‘LEIA’, ‘lmspider’, ‘Lycos_Spider’, ‘Mediapartners-Google’, ‘MuscatFerret’, ‘NaverBot’, ‘OmniExplorer_Bot’, ‘polybot’, ‘Pompos’, ‘Scooter’, ‘Teoma’, ‘TheSuBot’, ‘TurnitinBot’, ‘Ultraseek’, ‘ViolaBot’, ‘webbandit’, ‘www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler’, ‘ZyBorg’,);

Add function
function isRobot()
{
foreach($this->_robots as $robot)
{
if(strpos($this->_agent, $robot) !== false)
{
return true;
}
}
return false;
}

Chris says:

I got it working fine with Google Chrome but it took a little bit of working out how to do it. Did you come back with the update?

Manuel Brotz says:

Hi

I use Shiretoko under Ubuntu 9.04.
This is Firefox 3.5 under Ubuntu.

Change the function checkBrowserFirefox():

    protected function checkBrowserFirefox() {
      $retval = false;
      if( eregi('Firefox',$this->_agent) ) {
        $aresult = explode('/',stristr($this->_agent,'Firefox'));
        $aversion = explode(' ',$aresult[1]);
        $this->setVersion($aversion[0]);
        $this->setBrowser(self::BROWSER_FIREFOX);
        $retval = true;
      } elseif( eregi('Shiretoko',$this->_agent) ) {
        $aresult = explode('/',stristr($this->_agent,'Shiretoko'));
        $aversion = explode(' ',$aresult[1]);
        $this->setVersion($aversion[0]);
        $this->setBrowser(self::BROWSER_FIREFOX);
        $retval = true;
      }
      return $retval;
    }

It works for me.

Greetz M. Brotz

Reiborn says:

Use of eregi() is causing warnings with PHP 5.3.0.. an update would be much appreciated!!

Juozas says:

My prev post a bit messed up… That’s real Code:

require_once “browser.php”;
$br = new Browser;
ecgo “Browser: “.$br->getBrowser().” “.$br->getVersion().” OS: “.$br->GetPlatform();
// full code at http://juozas24.puslapiai.lt/source.php?file=blah.php

Daniel Lang says:

@Chris

Any Idea if Google Chrome Frame will alter the USERAGENT? http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/

paris @ united worx web design says:

chromeframe will be used as i have read for Google Wave, they have decided to focus on safari,firefox,chrome and leave out IE since it would take a lot of development time. chromeframe should render a page using chrome rendering engine and therefore should identify itself as Google chrome.

thanks for getting a PHP 5.3 version ready chris, will sure grab a copy once its online.

Daniel Lang says:

Windows XP SP3 Build 2600 – IE v7.0.5730.13

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB6; chromeframe; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Than says:

I tried to use Browser.php on my website, which is hosted on Unix Operating System, it does not work. any idea? the following is the code:

getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_FIREFOX && $browser->getVersion() <= 4 )
{
echo "”;
}
elseif( $browser->getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_OPERA && $browser->getVersion() <= 10 )
{
echo "”;
}
elseif( $browser->getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_IE && $browser->getVersion() >= 8 )
{
echo “”;
}
elseif( $browser->getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_IE && $browser->getVersion() == 7 )
{
echo “”;
}
elseif( $browser->getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_IE && $browser->getVersion() == 6 )
{
echo “”;
}
elseif( $browser->getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_SAFARI && $browser->getVersion() <= 5 )
{
echo "”;
}
elseif( $browser->getBrowser() == $browser->BROWSER_CHROME && $browser->getVersion() <= 4 )
{
echo "”;
}
else
{
echo “”;
}
?>

thanks

basiL says:

functions eregi() and ereg_replace() have been removed from PHP 5.3 !!!!!!

windguard says:

Hey Chris, thanks for this amazing script.

The only problem I seem to be having with it is when I upload it on the server, it gives me this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in C:\Inetpub\vhosts\l2-standard.com\httpdocs\_common\_php\browser-detection.php on line 86

Am I doing something wrong or is there something wrong with my host? And is there any way this can be solved?

Thanks, windguard

Mark says:

Hey!
Just found this forum, Chris, please inform me when you have your script up… I’m so frustrated, each browser shows a site different… !

Daniel Lang says:

And ported to PHP4.x =D

http://mavrick.id.au/programming/2009/php-browser-detection-script-v1-6/

Enjoy!

Ron says:

Here is a suggestion, detect if they have a certain .NET version.
If I send the function “3.5.0.0″ then return true or false if they at least have that version installed.

Example,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb909885.aspx

juozas says:

Thanks for update. Now the script detects browser correctly.

Daniel Lang says:

@David

Seems dodgy… just my $0.02

We’re looking at including a better mobile base detection for this script, be sure to check back for more information at a later date

Ollie says:

Hi Chris,

Looking at your script, it is very nice, but might I make a small suggestion? There is a massive usage of preg_match, where something like stripos would do? Is there any reason for this? – stripos being usually a far faster solution, anyone looking at saving processing power in big scripts should consider this!

example:

if( preg_match(‘/blackberry/i’,$this->_agent) )

could be:

if(! stripos($this->_agent, ‘blackberry’) === false )

it achieves the same effect, and my execute faster, but does take a little extra typing!

Just a thought.

Regards,
Ollie

Alex10336 says:

Iceweasel support (full open source firefox)
[php]
/**
* Determine if the browser is Firefox or not
* @return boolean True if the browser is Firefox otherwise false
*/
protected function checkBrowserFirefox() {
$retval = false;
if( preg_match(‘/Firefox/i’,$this->_agent) ) {
$aresult = explode(‘/’,stristr($this->_agent,’Firefox’));
$aversion = explode(‘ ‘,$aresult[1]);
$this->setVersion($aversion[0]);
$this->setBrowser(self::BROWSER_FIREFOX);
$retval = true;
}
if( preg_match(‘/Iceweasel/i’,$this->_agent) ) {
$aresult = explode(‘/’,stristr($this->_agent,’Iceweasel’));
$aversion = explode(‘ ‘,$aresult[1]);
$this->setVersion($aversion[0]);
$this->setBrowser(self::BROWSER_FIREFOX);
$retval = true;
}
return $retval;
}
[/php]

Ben Dover says:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Avant Browser; Avant
Browser; .NETCLR 2.0.50727) probably MSIE version 6.0 running on Windows

That’s Avant

Binish Philip says:

Hi Chris,

Thanks a lot for this amazing script.

:Binish Philip

Kelly Watts says:

Thank you for this. It represents a ton of work that you have done and is very useful.

Arkante says:

Hi,

I do understand it is a lot of work to maintain such a script so why don’t you put it on a open github repo so that people can easily collaborate and improve the code ?

BTW, thanks for the script

Programmer A says:

I need help, i added the code for google bots but its not detecting it, can you please give me a hint what might be the problem.
Thank you

windguard says:

Thank you so much Chris!

By the way, I found something really useful and something many people would want;

Similar code to:

$browser_name = $browser->getBrowser();
$browser_ver = $browser->getVersion();

echo “You are using ” . $browser_name . $browser_version;

Will output something like this:

You are using Safari 4.0.1

That code could also be used in simpler if statements like this:

if($browser_name == “Safari” && $browser_version == “4.0.1″)
{
“Hey there! You are using Safari 4.0.1!”
};

Hope this helps

Thank you very much again Chris!!

Abhijit Aitwade says:

NICE CLASS

Josh says:

Hey I’ve not yet had a chance to put this class into action in my projects, but I wanted to let you know of something which I found with the current release that I’m assuming is erroneous…

I’m assuming my text editor opened the file with the wrong encoding type because there were little squares all throughout the document where line breaks should have been… However, after cleaning all that up and re-tabbing everything, I noticed on line 680 that there is a stray “echo” which doesn’t actually do anything…

Here’s the full function it’s in (along with the echo)


protected function checkBrowserMozilla() {
$retval = false;
if( preg_match('/mozilla/i',$this->_agent) && preg_match('/rv:[0-9].[0-9][a-b]?/i',$this->_agent) && !preg_match('/netscape/i',$this->_agent)) {
$aversion = explode(' ',stristr($this->_agent,'rv:'));
preg_match('/rv:[0-9].[0-9][a-b]?/i',$this->_agent,$aversion);
$this->setVersion(str_replace('rv:','',$aversion[0]));
$this->setBrowser(self::BROWSER_MOZILLA);
$retval = true;
}
else if( preg_match('/mozilla/i',$this->_agent) && preg_match('/rv:[0-9]\.[0-9]/i',$this->_agent) && !preg_match('/netscape/i',$this->_agent) ) {
$aversion = explode('',stristr($this->_agent,'rv:'));
preg_match('/rv:[0-9]\.[0-9]\.[0-9]/i',$this->_agent,$aversion);
echo
$this->setVersion(str_replace('rv:','',$aversion[0]));
$this->setBrowser(self::BROWSER_MOZILLA);
$retval = true;
}
return $retval;
}


A. Valiquette says:

Hello Chris!

I like your PHP Web browser detection class, but unfortunately it lacked some features I needed badly so I modified your class to add what I needed.

I took most of the week to revise the current version and to test my new features. I tested all the known versions of the following browsers with your class and my new improved version: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, Netscape and Mozilla.

This is the number of different User Agents I’ve tested with your class:
Internet Explorer tests: 3695
Netscape tests: 668
Mozilla tests: 505
Firefox tests: 4101
Safari tests: 650
Opera tests: 1173
Chrome tests: 375
Total: 11167

With your class v1.6 I’ve got 1358 errors (12.16%). With my version: 0.

What is lacking with 1.6 that I’ve added/improved:
- The class is not able to detect Safari < 3.0 since it's not in the UA. I did some research and added the support to all version < 3.0 (0.8 to 2.0.4).
- Added support of all Netscape versions (1.6 only supports v9).
- Better Firefox version parsing (in some rare/weird UAs the class don't parse correctly the version).
- Better (more precise) Opera version parsing.
- Rewrite of Mozilla detection function for better (more precise) results. FYI the current version also contain a bogus echo and a useless else statement (remnant of debug code?).
- In some unusual case Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Chrome, Opera can be mixed up. I fixed this.
- Fixed some place where the code issued a warning (using inexistent array indexes).

I will email you my changes (and my 11K+ tests) if you want to check & add them to your class.

Thanks!

Alexandre Valiquette
Wolfcast
Quebec, Canada.

Nilesh says:

nice work….i like your scripts Chris…keep up

Rob MacDonald says:

The isRobot check only appears to be checking for Yahoo!, Google and W3C. Shouldn’t you also add the MSN bot which powers Bing? Something like:

protected function checkBrowserMSNBot() {
if( stripos($this->_agent,’msnbot’) !== false ) {
$aresult = explode(‘/’,stristr($this->_agent,’msnbot’));
$aversion = explode(‘ ‘,$aresult[1]);
$this->setVersion(str_replace(‘;’,”,$aversion[0]));
$this->_browser_name = self::BROWSER_MSNBOT;
$this->setRobot(true);
return true;
}
return false;
}

juozas kudirka says:

very amazing, thanks!

Daniel Lang says:

Will work on the PHP4.x port soon

dave cohen says:

Chris -

Thanks for the code. One problem – Android and I think iPad return ‘Mobile Safari’ in the user agent string (my test iTouch works, tho). Thus, checkBrowsers finds Safari when using Android, and quits…with mobile set to false. Two ways around this:
- move section in checkBrowsers that looks at mobile devices (Android thru Nokia) above first section (WebTV thru Safari)
- add ‘Mobile Safari’ check above Safari check

Former results in browser identified as being Android, latter would result in browser identified as Mobile Safari.

oxygen says:

Extremely usefull and reliable. Thanks mate:)

Matthijs says:

By far the most expansive, best and complete way to detect browser, version and os. And best of all – it’s implemented in my own website in under 2 minutes. Thank you very VERY much for putting this out here!

Regards, Matthijs

Andrew says:

Thanks alot, it works alot better than a class called PHP Sniff that I was using before (Outdated I think).

Just tested it in I.e. 6, 7, 8, 9 (BETA) and Firefox 3.6.8 + 4(BETA), Chrome (V???) and the detection works correctly for every single one.

Wonderful work and thank you for your continued efforts to keep it compatible. It also intergated into my existing framework with less than 5 line changes to coding. =)