IE

[Maurice79]

I use basically only firefox for all my internet browsing and edited/created a few webpages. By accident i used IE to visit the pages and couldn't believe my eyes, it are totally different pages when viewing them with IE! Everything is messed up and borders are added i never added to the script or heights i never put that high. How is this possible? Is it possible to block the pages for IE users because i don't want people see the pages in IE view. To see what i mean click here.

[The Little Guy]

why not just code for both browsers?

[Maurice79]

I can't, i rarely know what i did now to create it. How is this possible because other sites look the same in IE and FF, can't i just block IE users form the pages, sorry for IE users but if you don't use a proper browser you dont earn the pages. Ofcourse the last thing i said is a joke, im just pissed off IE fuck up the pages and it seems i did everything for nothing because IE and FF users should view both the pages.

[The Little Guy]

<?php
$_AGENT = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

if(preg_match("~.+?MSIE.+?~",$_AGENT)){
   echo 'You have IE';
}else{
   echo 'You don\'t have IE';
}
?>

[Daniel0]

No...

 

1) You don't understand regular expressions properly. .+?MSIE.+? is the same as just MSIE.

2) Regex is overkill. Just use strpos.

However, 3) Browser detection cannot be relied on. See: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

4) Blocking users like that is bad. The text can be read just fine even though some things may be mispositioned.

 

Just use IE conditional comments to display a message to the user telling them to upgrade to a newer version of IE or pick a better browser. In that way they can still read the content with a broken layout.

[nrg_alpha]

Or you could do this:

 

echo (preg_match('#MSIE#',$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))? 'You are using IE. I\'m so sorry :*(' : 'Wlecome to the modern world, non IE user!';

 

Granted, not all IE versions are equal.. perhaps checking to see which version is in use if it is used?

 

if (preg_match('#MSIE (\d+)#', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $match)){
if ($match[1] < 7){
	// send the user to hell and make'em pay!!!
} else if($match[1] == 7){ // IE 7 detected..
	// Ok, version 7 is better than 6 or under, proceed...
}
}

 

or, if you are knowledgable enough with apache mod_rewrite, I think you can have built in redirects using an .htaccess file.

 

EDIT - Or strpos as Dan mentioned would work too.

[nrg_alpha]

See: http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

 

Interesting synopsis of the browser emulation evolution. Certainly (in the case of 'MSIE', older browsers (such as older Opera versions) did indeed have those letters in the value of $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] (but not so much anymore). Searching for 'Mozilla' will still definitely cause some issues I would think. From what I read once, it is ultimately better to test for browser features instead of browser agent info and make decisions based on that.

 

If one does check through agent info, I suppose it's best to really make some additional checks to ensure they have the correct agent to begin with. I'm not so terribly concerned with "MSIE" to be perfectly honest. I would be with "Mozilla" though.

[Daniel0]

The point of the article is that you risk breaking future application in this way.

[Vermillion]

Code on XHTML strict. When I was working on my second website, I was able to code properly for IE, Firefox and other Mozilla based web browsers. I did that by coding on XHTML Transitional.

 

... But later I considered the fact that a lot of people use Safari as their browsers. Google Chrome is widely used now as well, and both have the same rendering engine. They I tried my XHTML Transitional website on those browsers. And lord should you have seen the mess I created. Later I found out that coding on XHTML Strict increases your chances of making a website that looks fine on almost every browser.

 

Checking the user client with PHP is not always a reliable method. I heard that people can choose whether they can send the client information to the server or not.

[Daniel0]

Code on XHTML strict.

 

Fixed. Unless you serve it as application/xhtml+xml it'll de jure get parsed and interpreted as HTML by the browsers anyway, but if you serve it as such then you'll cut off all IE users.