willcode2surf / bowser

a browser detector

Bowser

A Browser detector. Because sometimes, there is no other way, and not even good modern browsers always provide good feature detection mechanisms.

So... it works like this:

if (bowser.msie && bowser.version <= 6) {
  alert('Hello China');
}

Detected Browsers

• msie
• safari[webkit]
• chrome[webkit]
• firefox[gecko]
• opera

Notes

Safari, Chrome, and Firefox will report that they have webkit|gecko engines

if (bowser.webkit) {
  // do stuff with safari & chrome
}

Ender installation

If you don't already have Ender (an npm package) install it now (and don't look back)

$ npm install ender

then add bowser to your module collection

$ ender add bowser

use it like this:

if ($.browser.chrome) {
  alert('Hello Silicon Valley');
}

Graded Browser Support

One useful feature of Bowser is that aside from checking one browser from another -- it will keep up to date with Yahoo's Graded Browser Support chart, giving you access to each grade on the bowser object

if (bowser.a) {
  // support full feature set
}
else if (bowser.c) {
  // serve degraded version
}
else {
  // unsupported (bowser.x)
}

Building

If you'd like to contribute a change to bowser, modify the files in src/, then run the following (you'll need node + npm installed):

$ npm install
$ make