Web design blog

Browser detection and feature detection: a brief survey of libraries and techniques.

Modernizr

modernizr.com

“Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user’s browser.”

Taking Advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 with Modernizr

has.js

has.js – “Pure feature detection library, a la carte style.”

Feature Detection with has.js

Detector

Detector is a simple, PHP- and JavaScript-based browser- and feature-detection library that can adapt to new devices & browsers on its own without the need to pull from a central database of browser information.

Stack Overflow pages

Plenty of lively discussion — as usual — at Stack Overflow:

JavaScript: Detecting browser library function – does one exist?

JavaScript libraries to detect browser capabilities/plug-ins

Library to detect and parse browser information

Browser detection versus feature detection

How do I redirect my client to a different page according to their browser?

Need a good JS browser detection library but not JQuery

Further reading

Browser detection in JavaScript libraries

detectmobilebrowsers.com

Detecting HTML5 Features

Browser and Feature Detection

Feature Detection: State of the Art Browser Scripting

Server-Side Device Detection: History, Benefits And How-To

Of course Mobile is big. And right now, of course, Apps are big.

But do Apps make mobile web browsers obsolete? On the contrary — mobile web browsers are more important than ever:

A few years ago, Morgan Stanley published a report in which they predicted that somewhere in 2012 more mobile devices would be shipped than PCs. Well, it happened two years earlier than predicted…. The way we interact online, email, etc., is shifting to mobile devices.

But is all this usage happening in native apps? No, as it turns out. 40% of Twitter’s traffic comes from mobile, of which 78% is from the mobile website. Mobile browser users increased over 300%. What people forget is that growth of native apps also drives growth of mobile web use.
In a nutshell, more people are going to be accessing your websites with a mobile device than with a desktop device….

Even if you have native apps, like Gowalla with a client for iOS, Android, Blackbery, etc., people will still post links in your native app and where does that take you? To a browser.
Anyway, it doesn’t have to be either a native app or a mobile web site. You can hedge your bets and do both… so you’re protected if Steve Jobs pulls the rug out from under you.

— Jeremy Keith @ adactio.com

Via Jeffrey Zeldman.

Microsoft has stepped up the pace in browser development — and taken strong measures to deal with a legacy of browser problems.

This week at Microsoft’s MIX11 Web developer conference, the company surprised many by making a pre-release version of Internet Explorer 10 available—less than a month after IE9 came out in its final form. But another surprise was uncovered by Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer: the next IE won’t run on any OS before Windows 7, including Vista.

Microsoft took some heat when it came out that Internet Explorer 9 would leave millions of Windows XP users in the lurch, as the new browser would only run on Windows 7 and Vista. But the company confirmed that IE10 won’t even run on Vista. In a statement to Computerworld, the company said “Windows Vista customers have a great browsing experience with IE9, but in building IE10 we are focused on continuing to drive the kind of innovation that only happens when you take advantage of the ongoing improvements in modern operating systems and modern hardware.”

— Michael Muchmore @ PCMag.com

Via Slashdot, where sgbett assesses the matter thus:

“In seriousness, this is the best thing [Microsoft] could do. The debacle that has been backwards compatibility of windows and ie in there various combinations [have] been horrible. Best thing to do is get all those grotty old windows/ie users upgraded. They are like people who drive around on modern [roads] in clapped out unsafe jalopies.

Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to reload their browsers …

Internet explorer is a bit like Ghenkis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Perhaps not the most obvious comparison, but give me a chance. So, Internet Explorer was launched in 1995 and by 2003 had a market share of close to 95%. Between the year 1206 and 1280 the Mongol Empire grew to stretch from Korea to Moscow.

The rapid expansion of the Mongol Empire is much like Internet Explorers rapid growth in popularity. The development of Internet Explorer was also fairly rapid and progressive. The Mongols were also progressive and introduced new technology and new thinking into a medieval Eurasia.

However like all Empires, over time cracks begin to appear. For the Mongols, their days of power were numbered and to make matters worse the epic trade routes that were built up now helped spread the Black Death which decimated both Mongol and other populations.

— Greg Jacobs

From a recent post at Slashdot:

Yesterday Microsoft released IE9 and since then we’ve been getting tons of submissions about it: It’s hard to tell if it is a threat to web development or the fastest thing on the web or even a waste of time. You’ll just have to decide for yourself … if you are one of the 9% of Slashdot readers who actually uses IE.

— IE 9 Released, Media Has Opinions @ Slashdot

From the comments:

I’m glad we’re at least finally able to have a discussion about IE’s competitive performance versus other browsers, instead of the number of rendering bugs, workarounds, and hacks required to support it. I don’t exactly pay a lot of attention to the latest browser benchmark news with regard to cheating, but it’s clear that the IE team has made enormous improvements. Look at the relative performance of IE8 versus the field, and IE9 versus the field. They’ve gone from orders of magnitude behind to being one third of the front-of-the-pack regarding performance. I never thought I’d see a performance battle between IE, Opera, and Chrome for the top spot, but here we are. Firefox will catch up I’m sure, but I’m still extremely impressed with the ground that the IE team has made up.

— Slashdot comment

Press release of interest to Flash developers:

Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed “Wallaby.”

Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad.

Wallaby has a very simple user interface, which accepts as input a FLA file and exports HTML and support files to a user-selected folder. There is also an option to launch the default application assigned for the .html extension, Adobe said.

The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5 and supported Webkit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS.

— International Business Times

Via Slashdot.

Browsers are important because they are a kind of public square, a place that everyone shares and nobody owns.

It is the nature of browsers to deliver information in a reasonably similar way on very different machines (desktop PC, desktop Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, etc.)

This has enormous implications for game design:

At the Game Developers Conference last week, Electronic Arts and now Digital Chocolate (Millionaire City) founder Trip Hawkins worried that evolutions in the multiplatform space would pose major challenges for developers trying to earn money in emerging spaces.

… The explosion of browsers onto mobile devices and the rise of cloud-based gaming can take much of the credit for why Hawkins, who was also Apple’s director of marketing prior to founding EA, believes that it’ll end up the game industry’s most central platform.

“The browser has taken over 2 billion PCs–it’s going to be taking over a billion tablets over the next few years, billions of mobile devices,” he says.

And it’ll even enter new areas: “It will end up in my opinion very strong on the television. The browser is the platform of the future,” Hawkins adds.

— Leigh Alexander @ Gamasutra

Via SlashDot.

See also FarmVille Now Worth More Than EA —

• Farmville is a browser-based game that has made its parent company, Zynga, very rich very quickly
• Electronic Arts (EA) is the world’s largest developer and bricks-and-mortar distributor of computer games

BrowserLab allows you to visualize your designs across popular browsers and operating systems

BrowserLab

As browser-based exploits and specifically JavaScript malware have shouldered their way to the top of the list of threats, browser vendors have been scrambling to find effective defenses to protect users. Few have been forthcoming, but Microsoft Research has developed a new tool called Zozzle that can be deployed in the browser and can detect JavaScript-based malware on the fly at a very high effectiveness rate. Zozzle is designed to perform static analysis of JavaScript code on a given site and quickly determine whether the code is malicious and includes an exploit. In order to be effective, the tool must be trained to recognize the elements that are common to malicious JavaScript, and the researchers behind it stress that it works best on de-obfuscated code.

— Slashdot

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing writes:

We’ve written before about the security vulnerability that allows websites to sniff your browsing history. A paper from UC San Diego computer science department researchers, An Empirical Study of Privacy-Violating Information Flows in JavaScript Web Applications [PDF], surveys which websites use this invasive technique against their users. YouPorn tops the list, but PerezHilton, Technorati, TheSun.co.uk, and Wired are also spying on their users’ browsing habits by exploiting this vulnerability.

— Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing