Browser Capabilities Project

Providing regularly updated browscap.ini and related downloads since 1998!

Microsoft had a good idea when they created browscap.dll and browscap.ini to use with their web server for browser identification.

In theory someone at Microsoft would routinely update the browscap.ini file and make it available to its customers. As a result we would all have reliable browser identification in order to know exactly what features the client's browser supports.

Sadly, Microsoft never made any attempt to keep the file up to date.

There was a brief wellspring of volunteers who did a good job of maintaining browscap.ini for awhile. Those sources are now either intentionally out of date as a way to drive product sales, or no longer exist. I can't blame them for giving up as this is not an easy project to maintain.

Here is what I do as part of my project.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning the website log files for this site and over thirty other sites of various types are downloaded for analysis. Once downloaded the log files are analyzed on a number of levels. Over the years I have developed a number of systems for automatically collecting the data I need for further analysis. The vast majority of new user agents each week are variations on existing user agents in my database, so when the analysis is complete I usually wind up with around two dozen truly new and unique user agents to investigate. I typically do my research on Sunday afternoon and only a few new user agents from major search engines and popular browsers are eventually added to the files in any given week.

User agent detection is still a long ways away from being 100% accurate though because there will always be new user agents that aren't in the files yet and hence won't be properly identified. There are also the bugs in both browscap.dll and PHP's get_browser(), which my files also support, to contend with. And of course there are always spoofed user agents. User agents that claim to be one thing, but in fact are often badly behaved bots masquerading as well behaved bots like Googlebot.

Approximately once a week, usually sometime on Monday afternoon, the raw data in my database is compiled into various reports, including the all-important browscap.ini file for browser identification, and gets uploaded to this website.

The files are freely available for download so long as you abide by my Terms of Use.

Backward compatibility with the classic browscap.ini format has been preserved.

Although targeted for Microsoft's web servers, IIS 5 and later, PHP can use the files as its data source in the get_browser() function. I am PHP's officially recommended source for that file. Due to the way PHP parses .ini files you will need to use my special version of browscap.ini for PHP, php_browscap.ini.

Drupal users can incorporate the Browscap module to identify user agents. I provide an uncompressed CSV file to accommodate Drupal.

My downloads page has links to several sites that offer PHP classes which do not depend on the native get_browser() function, or PHP's flaky .ini parser, or my special version of the files for accurate results. These classes have the added benefit of letting you define where the browscap.ini file should go, which is perfect for shared hosting environments where the host does not maintain an updated browscap.ini file for you.

While Microsoft has abandoned browscap.ini as a means of browser detection in favor of more sophisticated and better methods, there are still a large number of people who continue to rely upon browscap.ini for all sorts of purposes. With the data from my database being available in so many different formats it's easy to use it in any situation where accurate user agent detection is important.

My project has a long and bright future ahead of it to compliment its already long history of service to the web development community since 1998.

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