Question

Because windows xp renders certain fonts so poorly, i would like to detect whether the user is using that OS and add a class to the body accordingly.

I’m looking ideally for an html conditional statement or php $_SERVER var to do this

However failing that a piece of javscript along the lines of below would do

if(users_os === 'xp'){
    $('body').addClass('xp');
}

What avenues should i be persuing?!!!

thanks!

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EDIT: TO CLARIFY!

This is further development on a project which renders the webapp in nicer fonts if the user has it natively installed – see part of my solution here: for extending font stacks abilities.

Fonts render differently on combinations of OS and Browser, not Browser alone – i want to be able to know whether a user is on xp or not becuase it’s rendering of Calibri is so very poor

Answer 1

I fully agree with jAndy’s answer, you shouldn’t ever need OS detection for a web application and you should rarely need browser detection (the exception being stats/analytics, of course).

That being said, if you’re insistent you need this, you can get what you need to know using the PHP function get_browser():

$browser = get_browser();
echo $browser["platform"];
// -> "WinXP"