Browser detection

I am not a fan of user agent sniffing. I think it is a wholly inappropriate way to find out the capabilities of a user agent accessing your website.

However, it has its uses. Steve Souders built UA Profiler, for gathering browser performance characteristics. This is undoubtedly an important and intriguing project. In order to detect which browser you are using, he has written his own user agent sniffing code as he describes in his latest blog post.

He also offers to make this code available through a web service. This is an intriguing possibility. My first reaction was to think that this was an excellent move. A high quality user agent sniffer, improved upon by the community and its breadth of use that we could all access via a web service meaning we would not have to ask our users to download the code to do the detection.

Having calmed down slightly, I started to think more clearly. Overall, I am not convinced this is the best idea. Generally I feel that detecting a user agent from its user agent string is dangerous. This makes the assumption that no user agent spoofing is taking place, that your detection is granular and perfect enough and that browser features and support will not change. None of these are necessarily true.

I prefer to use feature detection. If I want to know whether the browser I am using is capable of applying a particular method, does that method exist?

The only reliable way I have found to detect a browser is for Internet Explorer only using conditional comments, both in HTML (useful for including CSS and JavaScript files for specific versions of IE) and in the JavaScript itself.

I notice that the latest version of jQuery (1.3) is deprecating its user agent sniffing. This decision is to be applauded.

I also realised that the next version of JSquared will actually add the ability to determine if the browser you are using is IE and if it is version 6 or another version. Whilst I might be adding a limited set of user agent support to my library, I am trying to do it in a fail-safe way.