Question

Which approach is more reliable to detect a mobile browser?

• UA sniffing

• Jquery’s width()

As I understand UA sniffing is not very reliable.

I need to change the HTML for a page according to the width of the mobile device viewing the page. I can’t do that with media queries alone.

Answer 1

You can use the mobile detect JS library to do this. Take note of the warning:

// WARNING: 
//   These JavaScript-based device detection features may ONLY work 
//   for the newest generation of smartphones, such as the iPhone, 
//   Android and Palm WebOS devices.
//   These device detection features may NOT work for older smartphones 
//   which had poor support for JavaScript, including 
//   older BlackBerry, PalmOS, and Windows Mobile devices. 
//   Additionally, because JavaScript support is extremely poor among 
//   'feature phones', these features may not work at all on such devices.
//   For better results, consider using a server-based version of this code, 
//   such as Java, APS.NET, PHP, or Ruby.