Auto detect mobile browser (via user-agent?)

Question

How can I detect if a user is viewing my web site from a mobile web browser so that I can then auto detect and display the appropriate version of my web site?

Answer 1

Yes user-agent is used to detect mobile browsers. There are lots of free scripts available to check this. Here is one such php code which will help you redirect mobile users to different website.

Answer 2

Yes, reading the User-Agent header will do the trick.

There are some lists out there of known mobile user agents so you don't need to start from scratch. What I did when I had to is to build a database of known user agents and store unknowns as they are detected for revision and then manually figure out what they are. This last thing might be overkill in some cases.

If you want to do it at Apache level, you can create a script which periodically generates a set of rewrite rules checking the user agent (or just once and forget about new user agents, or once a month, whatever suits your case), like

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (OneMobileUserAgent|AnotherMobileUserAgent|...)
RewriteRule (.*) mobile/$1

which would move, for example, requests to http://domain/index.html to http://domain/mobile/index.html

If you don't like the approach of having a script recreate a htaccess file periodically, you can write a module which checks the User Agent (I didn't find one already made, but found this particularly appropriate example) and get the user agents from some sites to update them. Then you can complicate the approach as much as you want, but I think in your case the previous approach would be fine.

Answer 3

The Mobile Device Browser File is a great way to detect mobile (and other) broswers for ASP.NET projects: http://mdbf.codeplex.com/

Answer 4

Hello

Please take a look at http://51degrees.codeplex.com/. It is an ASP.NET open source module which detects mobile devices and provides auto redirection to mobile optimized pages when request is coming from mobile device. It makes use of WURFL mobile device database. For redirection there is no need to modify existing ASP.NET web application pages.

Apart from this it also gives upto-date mobile capability information like manufacturer, model, screen height & width, image formats supported and MANY MORE...... which helps to customize pages for best mobile output.

Answer 5

There are open source scripts on Detect Mobile Browser that do this in Apache, ASP, ColdFusion, JavaScript and PHP.

Answer 6

Just a thought but what if you worked this problem from the opposite direction? Rather than determining which browsers are mobile why not determine which browsers are not? Then code your site to default to the mobile version and redirect to the standard version. There are two basic possibilities when looking at a mobile browser. Either it has javascript support or it doesn't. So if the browser does not have javascript support it will default to the mobile version. If it does have JavaScript support, check the screen size. Anything below a certain size will likely also be a mobile browser. Anything larger will get redirected to your standard layout. Then all you need to do is determine if the user with JavaScript disabled is mobile or not.
According to the W3C the number of users with JavaScript disabled was about 5% and of those users most have turned it off which implies that they actually no what they are doing with a browser. Are they a large part of your audience? If not then don't worry about them. If so, whats the worst case scenario? You have those users browsing the mobile version of your site.

Answer 7

we use one of the many handset detection web services out there. we chose handsetdetection.com as they also provide stats / analytics.

Just google "handset detection" and all the providers come up!

Answer 8

My favorite Mobile Browser Detection mechanism is WURFL. It's updated frequently and it works with every major programming/language platform.

Answer 9

bump

Found this site recently, http://detectmobilebrowser.com/ Seems to do a regular expression check for commonly known sequences of text in the UA string.

Provides code samples for various languages too.

Answer 10

I put this demo with scripts and examples included together:

http://www.mlynn.org/2010/06/mobile-device-detection-and-redirection-with-php/

This example utilizes php functions for user agent detection and offers the additional benefit of permitting users to state a preference for a version of the site which would not typically be the default based on their browser or device type. This is done with cookies (maintained using php on the server-side as opposed to javascript.)

Be sure to check out the download link in the article for the examples.

Hope you enjoy!

Answer 11

Regarding Mobile Device Browser File:

Quote: "Due to the organizational restructuring of the team that developed and supported the Mobile Device Browser file, we will no longer have the resources to support and update this CodePlex project. The team will be providing two more releases – one on the 27th July 2010 and the final release on the 24th August 2010."