Getting Browser Information and Capabilities in ASP.Net

While developing a web site or web application, one need to keep in mind the features supported by different browsers. This is very unfortunate that there is no industry standard in the browser market. Fortunately ASP.net provides HttpBroserCapability class to determine the browser type and features supported by the browser.

The browser property of request object returns the object of HttpBrowserCapability object. This object has several properties which provide the information about the browser type, version and features supported by this.

Following C# code explains how you can use HttpBrowserCapability class to fetch browser information.

private void btnBrowserInfo_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
System.Web.HttpBrowserCapabilities browser = Request.Browser;
string s = “Browser Capabilities\n”
+ “Type = “                    + browser.Type + “\n”
+ “Name = “                    + browser.Browser + “\n”
+ “Version = “                 + browser.Version + “\n”
+ “Major Version = “           + browser.MajorVersion + “\n”
+ “Minor Version = “           + browser.MinorVersion + “\n”
+ “Platform = “                + browser.Platform + “\n”
+ “Is Beta = “                 + browser.Beta + “\n”
+ “Is Crawler = “              + browser.Crawler + “\n”
+ “Is AOL = “                  + browser.AOL + “\n”
+ “Is Win16 = “                + browser.Win16 + “\n”
+ “Is Win32 = “                + browser.Win32 + “\n”
+ “Supports Frames = “         + browser.Frames + “\n”
+ “Supports Tables = “         + browser.Tables + “\n”
+ “Supports Cookies = “        + browser.Cookies + “\n”
+ “Supports VBScript = “       + browser.VBScript + “\n”
+ “Supports JavaScript = “     +
browser.EcmaScriptVersion.ToString() + “\n”
+ “Supports Java Applets = “   + browser.JavaApplets + “\n”
+ “Supports ActiveX Controls = ” + browser.ActiveXControls
+ “\n”;
txtBrowserInfo.Text = s;
}

I have placed one button on the aspx page and named it as Browser Information. The id of the button is btnBrowserInfo. On the click event of the button, I wrote the above code.

I also placed a TextBox on the page and named it as txtBrowserInfo.

First I initialized an HttpBrowserCapability object named browser with the Request object’s browser property. I fetched the different property of browser and concatenate these into a string variable. Finally I displayed the concatenated string into the text box.