#! code

As the new Google web browser was released last night (I'm writing this post using the new browser) I thought it would be good to update our readers on the user agent string that this web browser has.

The user agent of any browser can be found out by using the userAgent property of the navigator object. This is available in most modern browsers and is thankfully also present in Google Chrome.

navigator.userAgent

As an example the user agent for FireFox 3 on a Windows XP machine looks like this.

If you are running FireFox (or Chrome) then there is a handy little short cut you can use to view the source of a page you are looking at. If you add the text view-source on any web address then you will see the equivalent of viewing the source of a page (perhaps by pressing Ctrl+u). Although not entirely useful, it does have a couple of benefits, such as being able to view your code in another tab, rather than another window.

Retrieving the current user agent using PHP is done via the use of the $_SESSION super global array. The following line of code will print off your user agent.

echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

For Firefox on Windows this user agent will look like this.

Detecting the user agent in JavaScript can be important due to the way in which different browsers implement JavaScript. Sometimes it is necessary to create logic to do one thing in Firefox and another thing in IE. Luckily, all modern browsers support the navigator.userAgent property so that is a good start.

Because it is possible to mask your user agent in Opera it is necessary to detect this browser first. There are actually two different ways to hide the user agent in Opera. The default user agent is as follows: