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Browser detection in PHP

With Joomla! templates, there are various ways to deal with different browser-types. This might be necessary to add specific CSS-code for specific browsers, so within the world of webdesign there are already many tricks: A good designer knows about the VisualBasic-tricks for IE, but few know that there is also a Joomla!-class providing excellent browser-detection.

IE Conditional Comments

The most famous solution to deal with IE-specific tricks is to use a separate CSS-stylesheet that is loaded only by the IE-browser family. To do this, you use conditional comments which only work under IE because of its VB-script functionality.

<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="templates/<?php echo $this->template;?>/css/ie6.css" />
<![endif]-->

There are different variations here: You can check for browsers equaling a specific browser-version (like IE6 above), or match a browser lower or higher than a specific version.

The Joomla! way: Browser detection

The VisualBasic-trick only works for IE-browsers. For other browsers, you either need weird tricks that might involve JavaScript. Fortunately, the Joomla! Framework contains a class for browser detection, which allows you to dynamically build the template-output depending on the browser-version. This works, because when a browser requests a certain webpage, it sends a HTTP Request which also contains the so-called User Agent. Based on this User Agent you can make certain decisions.

jimport('joomla.environment.browser');
$browser = JBrowser::getInstance();
$ie6 = ($browser->getBrowser() == 'msie' && $browser->getVersion() == '6.0') ? true : false;
if($ie6 == true) {
...
}
 

Using our Yth class

With our Yireo Template Helper we provide you with a simple Yth-class, which makes adding these tricks to your template a lot easier. For instance, if you want to include a stylesheet "ie6.css" if the IE6 browser is used, you can add the following:

<?php if(Yth::isBrowser('ie6')) { ?>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" src="templates/<?php echo $this->template;?>/css/ie6.css" />
<?php } ?>
 

Conclusion

The main benefit of using the PHP-method, instead of the IE conditional statements, is that you can also check for other browsers like Opera, Chrome and Safari.