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Detecting Browser Capabilities

Introduction

Many web applications provide client side functionality based on the capabilities of browser. ASP.NET provides an easy way to get capabilities of browsers. The capabilities of a browser include things such as whether it supports cookies, javascript and ActiveX controls and browser type and version. Based on these capabilities you can decide whether to provide rich DHTML functionality or render page differently.

Browser Capabilities

The capabilities of browser are accessible from Request.Browser property. This property returns an instance of System.Web.HttpBrowserCapabilities class. The HttpBrowserCapabilities class contains many read only properties that tell us more about browser. Following table lists various properties of HttpBrowserCapabilities class and their values on my machine:

ActiveXControls	True
AOL	False
BackgroundSounds	True
Beta	False
Browser	IE
CDF	False
ClrVersion	1.0.3705
Cookies	True
Crawler	False
EcmaScriptVersion	1.2
Frames	True
JavaApplets	True
JavaScript	True
MajorVersion	6
MinorVersion	0
MSDomVersion	6.0
Platform	WinNT
Tables	True
TagWriter	System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
Type	IE6
VBScript	True
Version	6.0
W3CDomVersion	1.0
Win16	False
Win32	True

Sample Code

The article includes a sample code that displays above properties and their values. You can test it by creating a VS.NET web project and adding the files to it.