I am trying to detect if the browser is Safari. If so, only then do something. In all other browsers, do something else:

if ( navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('safari') == -1) {
    //if safari execute some function
} else {
   // if other browsers execute other function
}

However, I guess I am not using the right approach because it's not working. :P

I am trying to detect if the browser is Safari. If so, only then do something. In all other browsers, do something else:

if ( navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('safari') == -1) {
    //if safari execute some function
} else {
   // if other browsers execute other function
}

However, I guess I am not using the right approach because it's not working. :P

• javascript

• 3 It should be !=. Never rely on browser detection, but feature detection. – JCOC611 Commented Feb 13, 2011 at 21:29
• There is usually a better way to do this than to sniff the user agent. What is it that you want to do differently in safari? – Sean McMillan Commented Feb 13, 2011 at 23:55
• One good reason to sniff the browser is so you can work around a browser-specific bug. For example, I am working around a Safari bug improperly caching resources when Range headers are present in the GET. – hughw Commented Jan 20, 2013 at 15:34

3 Answers 3

if(typeof navigator.vendor!='undefined') &&
   navigator.vendor.toLowerCase().indexOf('apple')!=-1){
    ...
}

Quirksmode has a Browser Detection Script that you can use to detect the different browsers that are being used and then perform different actions based on that browser type.

Under the hood, it's essentially using the same technique that you are trying to use.

In your example, you actually are close. A quick fix is to just change the == to != and voila, your script should work!

However, I am running Chrome, not Safari! Yet, in my user agent string, I see the following:

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 
      (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.224 Safari/534.10"

The word "Safari" appears in my userAgent String, which means that, using your script, my browser would be treated as if it were Safari!

I ended up using

var isSafari = navigator.userAgent.match(/safari/i) != null && navigator.userAgent.match(/chrome/i) == null;

if(isSafari){
    // code here
  }