Tag Archives: WebKit

PHP: detecting mobile device

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HTTP_USER_AGENT

Beside that most of the responses of $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] may return, it appears that this is the most reliable way to track down a user agent with PHP. It is weird that most of the clients, i.e. Safari and Chrome will return something with Mozilla in it’s strings, but however it’s enough to track the “chrome” or “safari” sub strings.

All the examples bellow are from Mac OS X:

Firefox 3.6:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6

Note: there are both Mozilla and Firefox sub strings!

Safari 4:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; bg-bg) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10

Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.307.11 Safari/532.9

Note: Here they are Mozilla, Chorme and Safari!!!

Opera:

Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10

The day of mobile

Nowadays it’s normal to make a site with the presumption it will be visible from mobile. The war between Nexus One from Google and iPhone from Apple is just beginning and with all those devices with wide screens everything’s becoming more complicated.

User agent strings from Nexus One and iPhone

Both are weird, but both contain the keyword – “mobile” and that may help you make a check with something like this PHP snippet:

<?php
$mobile = !!(FALSE !== strstr(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), 'mobile'));
?>

CSS border-radius vs. images!

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Rounded corners

This is one of the main problems of web design and development now, even if it sounds strange. The thing is that with round corners the elements become more nice and groovy and most of the web designers make such design templates. The problem than comes over the web developer who’s supposed to convert this into HTML and CSS. Of course it would be nice if all browsers support rounded corners in CSS, but they don’t and guess what IE fully doesn’t support it.

-moz and -webkit

Most of you have heart about this patches in CSS when you can use this prefixes for Mozilla based and Safari’s Webkit based browsers. Than you can use border radius with no pain, and you get the same effect as with using images.

-moz-border-radius : 4px;
-webkit-border-radius : 4px;

Of course on IE this doesn’t work and the element remains with square corners. But what the question is, should we make both versions for non IE browsers without images and a version for the “great” MSIE and all of its versions?

My answer is: no!

Although many sites do that, see vimeo for instance, there’s no need to support that. As the rumor and the MSIE blog says in IE9 which is … coming soon there will be – border-radius property.

That’s awesome!

Finally Microsoft has done something good! So stop using background images! This is hard to maintain, difficult to make and it’s bad for the browser loading time, because of the extra images/sprites.

OBJECT & … forget about EMBED tag!

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Actually most of us think about OBJECT and EMBED tags as inseparate pair. The reality is different. In fact you don’t need to use the EMBED tag.

Only by using the OBJECT tag you ensure it will be interpreted correctly by every browser.

As you may know, the EMBED tag is supported by Gecko and WebKit, but not by IE. On the other side the OBJECT tag is supported by every one.

Why than the most common usage is with OBJECT and EMBED? That’s by me because of misunderstanding of the semantics of those two!