Why is there no plugin detection tecnique (like navigator.plugins) in PHP?

Question

Why is there no plugin detection tecnique (like navigator.plugins) in PHP? Why it is not implemented? It would be great! Any thoughts on how to do it?

Edit: Like in $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']

Answer 1

Do you want to detect php-plugins or browser-plugins?

browser-plugins:

send navigator.plugins to one of your php scripts via an ajax call.

php-plugins:

evaluate php_info() for the wanted plugin (maybe there is a more straightforward way?)

Answer 2

For browser information in general, the server only know what the client explicitly tells it, which is typically only a user agent string. You'll have to setup an AJAX method to send any other data you may want the server to know about on a per-session basis

For PHP extensions, you can use get_loaded_extensions(). From the documentation:

Example #1 get_loaded_extensions() Example

<?php
print_r(get_loaded_extensions());
?>

The above example will output something similar to:

Array
(
   [0] => xml
   [1] => wddx
   [2] => standard
   [3] => session
   [4] => posix
   [5] => pgsql
   [6] => pcre
   [7] => gd
   [8] => ftp
   [9] => db
   [10] => calendar
   [11] => bcmath
)

Answer 3

no reason, no thoughts