Question

I’ve searched for this and everything I find is way more than I need. I’ve done this in JavaScript before, but I would really prefer using PHP. How would I go about displaying a message to my visitors, depending on which browser they’re using?

Example:

IE User would see: “You’re using Internet Explorer”

Firefox User would see: “You’re using Mozilla Firefox”

I’m not exactly sure if there are other major browsers besides IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. But I would at least want to have a message directed to each one of those browsers individually. Thank you.

Answer 1

To identify the user’s browser server-side, you’ll have to parse the $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] variable…

… Or, probably better, use the get_browser function — just note you’ll have to configure something in php.ini, or you’ll get this kind of warning :

Warning: get_browser() [function.get-browser]: browscap ini directive not set

Like the PHP manual page says :

Note : In order for this to work, your browscap configuration setting in
php.ini must point to the correct
location of the browscap.ini file on
your system. browscap.ini is not
bundled with PHP, but you may find an
up-to-date » php_browscap.ini
file here.

While browscap.ini contains
information on many browsers, it
relies on user updates to keep the
database current. The format of the
file is fairly self-explanatory.

After downloading that file and adding this line to php.ini :

browscap = /home/squale/developpement/tests/temp/php_browscap.ini

The following portion of code :

var_dump(get_browser(null, true));

Gives me :

array
  'browser_name_regex' => string '^mozilla/5\.0 (x11; .*linux.*; .*rv:1\.9.*) gecko/.*$' (length=53)
  'browser_name_pattern' => string 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; *Linux*; *rv:1.9*) Gecko/*' (length=44)
  'parent' => string 'Mozilla 1.9' (length=11)
  'platform' => string 'Linux' (length=5)
  'browser' => string 'Mozilla' (length=7)
  'version' => string '1.9' (length=3)
  'majorver' => string '1' (length=1)
  'minorver' => string '9' (length=1)
  'alpha' => string '1' (length=1)
  'frames' => string '1' (length=1)
  'iframes' => string '1' (length=1)
  'tables' => string '1' (length=1)
  'cookies' => string '1' (length=1)
  'javaapplets' => string '1' (length=1)
  'javascript' => string '1' (length=1)
  'cssversion' => string '2' (length=1)
  'supportscss' => string '1' (length=1)
  'beta' => string '' (length=0)
  'win16' => string '' (length=0)
  'win32' => string '' (length=0)
  'win64' => string '' (length=0)
  'backgroundsounds' => string '' (length=0)
  'cdf' => string '' (length=0)
  'vbscript' => string '' (length=0)
  'activexcontrols' => string '' (length=0)
  'isbanned' => string '' (length=0)
  'ismobiledevice' => string '' (length=0)
  'issyndicationreader' => string '' (length=0)
  'crawler' => string '' (length=0)
  'aol' => string '' (length=0)
  'aolversion' => string '0' (length=1)

on firefox 3.5 ; and :

array
  'browser_name_regex' => string '^.*$' (length=4)
  'browser_name_pattern' => string '*' (length=1)
  'browser' => string 'Default Browser' (length=15)
  'version' => string '0' (length=1)
  'majorver' => string '0' (length=1)
  'minorver' => string '0' (length=1)
  'platform' => string 'unknown' (length=7)
  'alpha' => string '' (length=0)
  ....
  'aol' => string '' (length=0)
  'aolversion' => string '0' (length=1)

On a recent version (4.0.203.2) of google chrome for Linux — well, considering it’s some kind of nightly build, I suppose it’s normal that it’s not recognized…

As a reference, here is it’s user-agent string :

string 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.203.2 Safari/532.0' (length=109)

This show that get_browser is nice ; but maybe not perfect for some cutting-edge test browser — still, should work fine with most “common” browsers, I suppose…