How can I detect the user’s browser in Rails?
Thanks.
request.user_agent
Kent.
On Tuesday 07 Feb 2006 23:01, Kent S. wrote:
request.user_agent
Though please use that with extreme care and discretion, Thiago -
browser
sniffing based on user-agent string is generally a very bad idea. I’m
not
saying you’re definitely doing it the wrong way (since I don’t know
what
you’re trying to do), but chances are there’s a better way you can solve
almost any scenario where user-agent detection used to be the accepted
solution a few years back.
Server-side user-agent sniffing in particular… if you’re using that to
serve
up different versions of pages to different browsers, please seriously
reconsider! The only thing I would use server side UA detection for
these
days is something like error log generation for the site owner.
Public-facing server-side UA detection is a big no-no, as far as I’m
concerned - it doesn’t work, unnecessarily hurts users, isn’t future
proof,
and basically isn’t even particularly necessary in the first place.
If you code to web standards, there are a lot of easy methods you can
use to
make your site gracefully degrade for non-standards compliant (eg.
older…
or Microsoft written, hehehe!) browsers. I don’t want to go into too
much
detail here, because I hope you already know most of these techniques.
If
not, a good place to start is…
… which is one of the best web development books I ever bought.
All I wanted to say is that whenever anyone mentions browser detection,
especially server side, my alarm bells go off!! So I hope you are using
it
for the right reasons, and if so, please accept my apologies for the
unwarranted concern!
Cheers,
~Dave
–
Dave S.
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development
http://www.rentamonkey.com/