How to check if the browser is Safari programmatically?

In this article, we review how you can check if the browser is Safari programmatically. We will look at:

1. isSafari function

2. navigator.userAgent

isSafari function

I found the following code in the snapdom/src/utils/helpers.js

export function isSafari() {
  return /^((?!chrome|android).)*safari/i.test(navigator.userAgent);
}

This function uses a regular expression to determine if the browser is Safari and uses the navigator.userAgent API.

navigator.userAgent

The Navigator.userAgent read-only property returns the user agent string for the current browser.

This is a test I ran to see this function in action in my Google chrome’s browser.

I found an interesting point in the MDN docs:

Browser identification based on detecting the user agent string is unreliable and is not recommended, as the user agent string is user configurable. For example:

• In Firefox, you can change the preference general.useragent.override in about:config. Some Firefox extensions do that; however, this only changes the HTTP header that gets sent and that is returned by navigator.userAgent. There might be other methods that utilize JavaScript code to identify the browser.

• Opera 6+ allows users to set the browser identification string via a menu.

Learn more about navigator.userAgent.

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References:

1. https://github.com/zumerlab/snapdom/blob/main/src/utils/helpers.js#L284

2. https://github.com/zumerlab/snapdom/blob/main/src/api/snapdom.js#L8

3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/userAgent