I have a website,which is "currently" designed & tested to work only on firefox.If user tries to open it in other browser then I want to show a popup saying "This site works best with Mozilla Firefox. We're working hard to add support for your favorite browser. Meanwhile, do try it with Firefox."
Can we provide a buttion on clicking of which, one new window will be opened in firefox preloaded with some URL ? and also tells us in case firefox is not available at its default location ?
Thanks,
Sourabh
If you make your website standard-conformant, chances are pretty high it will work in Firefox, Opera and WebKit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome), without having to use much browser-specific code. Problem is, as usual, with IE. To achieve best results, write a website for standard-compliant browsers, then add hacks to make it work in IE.
You cannot detect installed applications on client computer, nor launch any of them - beacuse of security. All you can do is to do browser sniffing. You can do it on server side (by examining User-Agent header), or on client side (using JavaScript to check window.navigator object). It is quite complicated and error-prone though and certainly not forward-compatible (future browser versions may confuse your scripts). Moreover, users can change their browser's identification. When you detect unsupported browser, you could display some popup asking user to switch browser.
If you want to detect only IE, you can use IE's conditional comments, which is a most reliable way for detecting IE.
You can't test for Firefox being available nor start it using JavaScript. That would create big security holes...
You can try to figure out if the current browser is Firefox and output a message, although I really hate them (remember that not every visitor will be able to install/use another browser, e.g. within companies or public places).
If it only works on one browser, it isn't a website.
Sometimes we have to rush our work and compromise, but there is a cut-off point where more time is the only sensible option. Making your website multi-browser-compatible is one such example.
However, if you have to detect the user's browser, you could look at quirksmode. Mozilla have good article on browser detection, and the related issues.
A better alternative to browser detection, would be feature detection and Modernizr is very good at this.
Related
I've tried on getting browser info from javascript - navigator.userAgent, but cannot find any related string with "Vivaldi".
Please help to suggest if there are any other programming method or javascript can be used to detect Vivaldi browser?
The correct syntax in JavaScript is navigator.userAgent.
You can check window size, but it may be incorrect.
Vivaldi has its own sidebar and bottom bar that the others not.
But remember, user can change the window size to prevent detection.
According to Vivaldi, the userAgent will not have Vivaldi in it for a better user experience and mimic Chrome in all sites except a few known ones.
For the next release of Vivaldi, we have decided to try something different. The problem with our current approach is that with the web being almost infinite, we can’t possibly discover all the websites who have blocks set against us. Thus maintaining a list of sites where we present a non-Vivaldi User Agent is difficult. Instead, we will try doing the reverse. For a handful of sites where we know the label Vivaldi (and our version number) is responsibly used, we will present our full User Agent. Those sites being our own and a handful of interesting alternative search engines: duckduckgo.com, ecosia.org, qwant.com, and startpage.com. Every other site will get a User Agent that appears to be identical to Chrome.
src: https://vivaldi.com/blog/user-agent-changes/
Since you haven't mentioned your use case, assuming you are building sites, the best solution would be to do what everyone does. I recommend building websites agnostic to browsers and devices, but responsive to resolutions and feature support. Almost all of the browsers are running on Chromium these days, except Safari and Firefox (to my knowledge). So they are all going to work consistently across the board. For any given feature, one could always refer to w3c or mdn docs for compatibility and build around that.
Browser detection is also not quite reliable, as there are extensions to spoof the information. Like this extension that mimics a TV agent so one can run youtube console version on it.
On the other hand, once again I don't know your use case, one might benefit from platform detection over browser detection, like catering to mobile and TV users. Even then, if you have a site responsive enough the platform becomes non-essential information.
One of the requirements of one of my clients is to show a message to a user that's using an older version of Firefox, Chrome, IE or Safari. For the last two it's easy (IE 9+ and Safari 5+). But for Firefox and Chrome, the requirement is that the site supports the current and the previous version of each browser.
To get the clients browser and version is quite simple, but I need to know what is the last version of each browser. Is there any way of doing that?
Well, technically, all you need is a place that keeps track of what the latest version of each browser (Ideally with a web service).
A quick Googling I was able to find: http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/articles/latest-browser-versions.php
It's not a web service, but you could simply parse that HTML and get the latest version of each browser. Alternatively, you could keep track yourself and manually update this information in your database.
You should only ever have to worry about IE when it comes to version enforcement. Exception being, of course, if you need a specific API that's just not available in previous versions of Chrome/Firefox, but in that case you'd look and enforce the API, not the browser version. Adding to that, if Chrome/Firefox don't have an API, chances are even the most bleeding edge version of IE won't either, so the point is moot. The fact is Firefox and Chrome, and in part Safari, are far ahead of IE when it comes to browser hosted capabilities that trying to enforce specific versions of the former would likely be a lot of wasted time and effort to yield nothing substantial.
The best I could find was this. It has an export option that allows to export in JSON, XML...
I would strongly suggest that you don't check the browser version, instead try doing feature detection using, say, Modernizr.
What features of your client's site depends on specific versions of each browser? If you use Modernizr you could perform a check on a feature, say some video stuff, and if the current browser does not support that feature, then display a message to the user suggesting they upgrade their browser.
Detecting browser versions via Javascript is very flakey at best.
The only reason I'd say you need this kind of verification is because your webpage has features only available to latest browsers. Instead of relying on version numbers, I suggest learning Modernizr.js for your website.
http://modernizr.com/
It can detect particular html5/css3 features individually.
Well the title explains my whole question. What i want to archive, is a revolutionary 'upgrade' button, that when you press it, the browser's native 'update' window pops up. If it is not present, then it create's an fake update window, so that users can update the browser.
I do not longer want to support the old IE6 browser. I want to force my users to upgrade their browser as it is insane to support a 10 year old browser.
If you are looking to get remove support for IE 6, I suggest visiting Microsof't website dedicated to the cause
http://www.ie6countdown.com/
The site contains instructions on how to place a banner on your site advising IE 6 users that they are using a very out of date browser.
http://www.ie6countdown.com/join-us.html
It informs them how to upgrade.
Nope, there is no way to do this from within JavaScript. Luckily!
I want to force my users to upgrade their browser as it is insane to support a 10 year old browser.
Fortunately, that is not possible. You could redirect users to their respective browser's upgrade page; however, I would consider that very impolite. It's not our business to force people to do anything; if your site doesn't support a specific browser, simply don't display it.
In the case of IE6, it might be justified to link to the IE6 countdown page, but consider that a lot of users have no control over what browser they use.
I don't think that's possible. You'll be better off creating your own dialog box (which looks like the IE About box) otherwise spam pages would eat our head with popping up the about dialog all the time.
Short answer, no.
It's a huge security breach to allow JavaScript to install arbitrary software. If you don't want to support IE6, don't, eventually the web will break for these users and they will be forced to upgrade, but what do you think gives you the right to dictate what software users should use?
You could use IE Conditionals:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.location.href = '404.html';
</script>
<![endif]-->
If they can't get to your website, they're not exactly a user of your website, correct?
Just keep in mind it used to be the other way around. It's better to be nice and warn them they may have a poor experience, than try to take over their computer. :)
Is there a way using jQuery or Javascript to force a page to open in Firefox? For example, if the user has their default browser set to internet explorer, but they have firefox on their computer - open a new firefox window with the intended page. If so, I would need to check to see if they have firefox on their machine; otherwise, redirect to the mozilla firefox download site...
any suggestions?
The answer, simply, is no. They don't have file system access like that for security reasons. You can probably imagine what would happen if, say you wrote a program that could crack open QuickBooks and take a look around. If you're worried about compatibility, you can use JavaScript checks to notify them that your page needs to be viewed with Firefox and refuse continuation until they get that settled.
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
Or, you know, do it the old fashioned way and build a web page that is cross-browser compatible.
Alternatively, ActiveX might be able to do it, but the user has to accept permissions, and this is highly shady activity.
No. Web browsers do not provide information on other applications installed on a system. It would have security ramifications, such as presenting a fake McAfee antivirus dialog to folks who had McAfee antivirus installed.
I do web site debugging with Internet Explorer (as well as other browsers), but my problem is with Internet Explorer, as it is the browser I usually use for regular browsing.
In order to debug you need to turn on debug mode in the advanced options. OK, fine. It's turned on. But the issue I have, that is quite annoying, is that it seems 30% of websites have JavaScript errors, and Internet Explorer in debug mode causes a popup. This is now also the case with Stack Overflow as well, where I spend a lot of time now. Every time I edit I get a JavaScript error pup up.
I guess it comes down to this: Is there a way to QUICKLY enable and disable debug mode, such as a Hokey, or an add-in, so you don't have to go into Advanced Options to enable and disable?
I should mention I do mainly ASP.NET development and use Visual Studio. I do already use Firefox/Firebug for some scenarios and non Internet Explorer-related issues. I'm not really looking to switch around what I do or how I do it, mainly looking for a solution to the problem at hand. Even a workaround that doesn't involve using other browsers/debuggers.
The quickest way I can think of would be to write a small utility to:
Close all IE windows
Toggle the REG_SZ registry value HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Disable Script Debugger (from "yes" to "no" or vice versa)
Optionally restart IE
As far as I know, there's no way to make IE recognize the changed registry value without restarting it, even using an IE plugin.
As an aside, unless the IE/VS integration is critical for you, you may want to look into the combination of Firefox and Firebug for Javascript debugging: I find it much nicer in general, and debugging can easily be enabled or disabled, either interactively or on a per-site basis.
I recommend using Firefox + IE Tab, which would allow you to easily and quickly change the rendering engine used for sites that require IE. This way the bulk of your browsing can be done in non-IE tabs and you can avoid the debug popups.
Have a look at debugbar. It's free for personal use, and it has a 60 days trial for commercial. It works a bit like fireug for Firefox, but obviously it's going to cost to use.