How To Auto-detect That Someone Is On An iPad Web Browser

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04.06.10

How To Auto-detect That Someone Is On An iPad Web Browser

By Dave Taylor

I'm working on my Web site and now that the Apple iPad is out, I'd like to customize my greeting for people using that device. How can I auto-detect that they're on an iPad?

Dave's Answer:

There are a ton of tools to help you with this particular task, and I've written about it before too (see How to detect an iPhone web browser). The basic idea is that every Web browser on every hardware platform sends what's called a USER_AGENT identifier. Almost all of the time they're accurate, but some test browsers have the ability to pretend they're something else (known in the biz as "spoofing", actually).

On my Mac OS X system, for example, when I am hitting Web pages within Google's Chrome browser, here's what is sent to the Web server
for each and every transaction I do, whether an HTML page, PHP search result or even ask for a photo or other image:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.347.0 Safari/533.2

You can check your Web browser too. Just pop over to Microsystools and find out.

Now, the question of the moment is, what string does it show when you're on an Apple iPad?

Here's the answer:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version /4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

Pretty ugly, really, but the key thing to notice is that the first word within parens identifies the hardware platform. If you're writing code of some sort, simply grab the USER_AGENT string, then check that first word.

Oh, if you're on an iPhone and you go to the same page, here's the USER_AGENT you are sending on each query:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version /4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16

Good luck!

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About the Author:
Dave Taylor is known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

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