Detect exact OS version from browser

by

Short answer: You can’t.

Long answer:

All you have is the information in the HTTP User-Agent header, which usually contains the OS name and version.

Usually, browsers running on Mac OS and Linux send enough information to identify the exact OS. For example, here’s my User-Agent header:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009030423 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.7

You can see that I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

And here’s what Firefox and Safari 4 Beta report on my MacBook Pro:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021906 Firefox/3.0.7

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16

Windows browsers, on the other hand, usually only report the OS version and not the specific package (Pro, Business, etc.):

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:x.x.x) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/x.x

More Related Contents:

  1. Track when user hits back button on the browser
  2. How can we open a link in private browsing mode
  3. How to get exact browser name and version?
  4. Submit a form using Shift + Enter [duplicate]
  5. How is this not passing PHP values to JS and vice-versa?
  6. get user timezone [duplicate]
  7. Download file through an ajax call php
  8. Returning JSON from PHP to JavaScript?
  9. Javascript equivalent of PHP’s list()
  10. int((0.1+0.7)*10) = 7 in several languages. How to prevent this?
  11. Passing PHP variable into JavaScript [duplicate]
  12. Passing Javascript Variable to PHP using Ajax
  13. Developing a tracking pixel
  14. Jquery – Uncaught TypeError: Cannot use ‘in’ operator to search for ‘324’ in
  15. How to pass JS variable to php?
  16. How does similar_text work?
  17. Automatically detect user’s current local time with JavaScript or PHP
  18. Pass data from jQuery to PHP for an ajax post
  19. Whats the easiest way to determine if a user is online? (PHP/MYSQL)
  20. Javascript function post and call php script
  21. Unserialize PHP Array in Javascript
  22. onbeforeprint() and onafterprint() equivalent for non IE browsers
  23. passing PHP objects to javascript [duplicate]
  24. How to rotate image and save the image
  25. Cross Domain Ajax Request with JQuery/PHP
  26. Converting Javascript Regex to PHP
  27. show progressbar while loading pages using jquery ajax in single page website
  28. Using javascript history.back() fails in Safari .. how do I make it cross-browser?
  29. How to handle newlines in Javascript? (from PHP)
  30. displaying a message after redirecting the user to another web page [duplicate]

Leave a Comment