Question

As the title says, is there a reliable way to detect whether a user is visiting my page using Chrome on Mac using PHP?

I have a bug that only displays when using Chrome on Mac, and until I get it sorted out I would like to have a popup to recommend the users to use a different browser.

Answer 1

Use $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] to find the users’ user agent and a function to check if this is within the string.

//The following will find out whether the user is using a Mac, obviously you can change this by echoing the user agent to find out what you need to search for.
$browser = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Chrome");
$os = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X");

if($browser !== false && $os !== false) {
  //do stuff if on a mac with Chrome
}

This will work with any type of Mac OS X software and any version of Chrome. If you want to narrow your results down further, you can just use:

if($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] == "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_4) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11" ) {
  //do stuff here
}