Navigator.useragent accuses Mozilla in IE

Question

Navigator.useragent accuses Mozilla even being in IE 11, had thought it would be Internet Explorer or something like, which explains this fact?

What to do to identify if the browser is IE or Moz.. etc.. ?

Answer 1

Generally speaking useragent is not reliable for detecting browsers. Countless times in history browsers insert other people’s words and create confusion and code that stops working. One of the last examples is windows phone have in your UA like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit which causes windows phone to be detected as iPhone...

The ideal way is to use Feature Detection (or is detected by functionality) to correct any problems.

Anyway, to answer the question here is the code we use on Mootools when functionality is needed.

(original Github code here) (jsfiddle: https://jsfiddle.net/95hczzya/)

function getBrowser(ua, platform) {
    ua = ua.toLowerCase();
    platform = (platform ? platform.toLowerCase() : '');

    // chrome is included in the edge UA, so need to check for edge first,
    // before checking if it's chrome.
    var UA = ua.match(/(edge)[\s\/:]([\w\d\.]+)/);
    if (!UA) {
        UA = ua.match(/(opera|ie|firefox|chrome|trident|crios|version)[\s\/:]([\w\d\.]+)?.*?(safari|(?:rv[\s\/:]|version[\s\/:])([\w\d\.]+)|$)/) || [null, 'unknown', 0];
    }

    if (UA[1] == 'trident') {
        UA[1] = 'ie';
        if (UA[4]) UA[2] = UA[4];
    } else if (UA[1] == 'crios') {
        UA[1] = 'chrome';
    }

    platform = ua.indexOf('windows phone') != -1 ? 'windowsmobile' : ua.match(/ip(?:ad|od|hone)/) ? 'ios' : (ua.match(/(?:webos|android)/) || ua.match(/mac|win|linux/) || ['other'])[0];
    if (platform == 'win') platform = 'windows';

    return {
        //extend: Function.prototype.extend,
        name: (UA[1] == 'version') ? UA[3] : UA[1],
        version: parseFloat((UA[1] == 'opera' && UA[4]) ? UA[4] : UA[2]),
        platform: platform
    };
};
var browser = getBrowser(navigator.userAgent, navigator.platform);
alert(JSON.stringify(browser, null, 4));