We've recently built a WebExtension for our Web Application as Add-on and extra feature to sell đź’°đź’¸ (b/c why not). We decided to serve 4 different browser types: Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox. So we had to figure out which browser is rendering our page to display a browser-specific instructions to the users.
You're lying to me. Aren't You?
Browser detection using the user agent is just sucks!! because it's trivial to spoof this value. For example the snippet below:
navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Chrome') !== -1
returns true for both Google Chrome and Opera (since Opera replaces its engine with Blink + V8 used by Chromium) because its UA string looks like Chrome. Thats is not what am looking for. And if we're trying to detect a specific browser, the point of feature-checking is kind of lost.
Check out MDN web docs: Browser detection using the user agent for futher details.
Top-level object FWT
window is the top-level object in the Browser Object Model (BOM) hierarchy. Every single browser has its own properties such as ApplePayError in Safari for instance, in addtion to the standard ones (e.g. window.location, window.console, ...etc).
Solution
/*
* Browser detection
* @return {String}
*/
const browserDetection = () => {
const browsers = {
firefox: !!window.InstallTrigger,
safari: !!window.ApplePaySession,
opera: window.opr && !!window.opr.addons,
chrome: window.chrome && !!window.chrome.webstore
};
return Object.keys(browsers).find(key => browsers[key] === true);
};
console.log(browserDetection()) // browser name expected
-
Firefox: TheÂ
InstallTrigger interface is an interesting outlier in the Apps API. -
Safari:
ApplePaySession belongs to the Apple Pay JS API. A session object for managing the payment process on the web. -
Opera:
oprself explanatory..opr.addonsrepresent interface in the Add-ons API -
Chrome:
chrome.webstoreAPI to initiate app and extension installations "inline" from web page
Tested in the following "Desktop Browsers":
âś“ Firefox Quantum Version ~60
âś“ Google Chrome Version ~67
âś“ Opera Version ~53
âś“ Safari Version ~11
Please keep in mind, that solution worked just perfectly in my case, and might not fit yours.
Demo on Codepen
Feedback are welcome. If you have any suggestions or corrections to make, please do not hesitate to drop me a note/comment.
Top comments (6)
For Chrome detection, try:
var isChrome = !!window.chrome && (!!window.chrome.webstore || !!window.chrome.runtime);Thanks, just what I needed.
Keep in mind that the chrome.webstore check will be depreciated in about a month's time: blog.chromium.org/2018/06/improvin...
UPD. Thank you!
Hello Mahmoud :) Any update? regarding detecting chrome agent?
var isChrome = !!window.chrome;
Probably you want to exclude chrome-based browsers, like opera
var isOpera = window["opr"] && !!window["opr"].addons;
var isChrome = !!window.chrome && !isOpera;