Detecting Google Chrome Using Javascript

Written by David Walsh on Wednesday, September 3, 2008


As we all know, Google’s Chrome browser hit the web yesterday. Whether you wanted to or not, you definitely downloaded Google’s effort to see what ingenuity they put into their browser. It’s clean, fast, and more stable than Firefox has been for me lately. Of course, there’s always a chance that Chrome will have a quirk that none of the other browsers have and you may need to use client side detection to fix the problem. You can detect Chrome by using the following bit of Javascript:

var is_chrome = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('chrome') > -1;

The following string represents Chrome’s full user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Have any Chrome-specific functionality you want to build? Maybe a MooTools slide-in script that says “Hey, you’re using Google’s new browser!” It’s probably too soon to try to fix Chrome-related bugs, but knowing how to detect it sooner rather than later is a good thing.


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Commenter Avatar September 03 / #
Janko says:

Thanks for sharing this. I hope there won’t be any Chrome-specific fixing :)

Commenter Avatar September 03 / #

Thank you! Very clever!!!

Commenter Avatar September 03 / #
deef says:

Chrome crashed a couple of times of by now.

Keeping FireFox for now, Chrome does have some nice fresh ideas like e.g. the way it separates various threads.

Thank you for the js-tip!

Commenter Avatar September 04 / #
Martin says:

It’s a nice idea. The only problem is that Google Chrome have exactly the same userAgent string as Apple’s Safari (at least on the Windows platform). I was trying to find out if there is anyway to tell the difference between them by searching the web and that’s how I ended up on your nice blog.

Commenter Avatar September 04 / #

As it’s still beta there may be one or two bugs, none that I have found so far, but I can’t imagine Google signing off on a product that didn’t fully adhere to standards. So maybe it will be the fixes we’ve had to implement for other browsers that cause issues in Chrome.

Since Chrome was built to handle the next generation of web applications I can see us developers needing code to detect chrome in order to allow more functionality to be shown that legacy browsers maybe cannot handle and which is turned off or hidden by default.

Anyway, thanks for the code snippet, though hopefully I’ll never need it.

Commenter Avatar September 04 / #

Thanks a lot for sharing..! But i still have no idea what should we fix in Chrome =D

Commenter Avatar September 04 / #

Chrome appears to pass Acid2, but does not pass Acid3 (linktest failed, and only 79 scored for me on Vista Home Premium). So there may be some issues, particularly when using JS libraries.

Commenter Avatar September 16 / #
film fan says:

i keep learning about more and more advantages and features with Chrome, with privacy, for example; now if only they would take care of it’s cookie management glitches…

Commenter Avatar September 24 / #

http://browserspy.dk/googlechrome.php will also show you the version and some additional information about Google Chrome.

Commenter Avatar September 28 / #
chrismarx says:

I’m having trouble with a custom cursor (.cur file). chrome doesn’t appear to be respecting the correct hotspot set on the cursor. ff/ie have no problem.

David Walsh September 28 / #
david says:

@chrismarx: Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that issue.

Commenter Avatar September 28 / #
chrismarx says:

looks like they might be on to the problem, check it out:

r2406 Fix an issue with tooltips showing up in the wrong location.

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/release-notes

Commenter Avatar October 05 / #
sling says:

CSS margin tag doesn’t work with a percentage value in chrome.
eg.
.class{margin:10% 15%} doesn’t work

Commenter Avatar October 09 / #

Chrome doesn’t always handle events that IE and Firefox consistently do. For example:

HTML

Javascript

function menu2Down(e){
findTarget(e)
…. }

function findTarget(e){

var targ;

if (!e) {var e = window.event }

if (e.target){ targ = e.target; }

else if (e.srcElement){ targ = e.srcElement; }

Perhaps you could check it out with a simple example

Commenter Avatar October 11 / #

You can also use this JavaScript library to detect any browser including chrome. Not only this, you can trim a string, detect mouse positions etc

http://rochakchauhan.com/blog/2008/10/11/rochakjs-javascript-class-of-common-functions/

Commenter Avatar October 11 / #
Jim Paget says:

Thanks for that! It’s been a great help! I’VE FOUND ANOTHER GOOGLE CHROME BUG:
(sorry, didn’t mean to shout, was just to grab your attention!) lol.
Overall I love Google Chrome, but one thing has just come up that I thought would be useful to point out: Google Chrome doesn’t respond to XML in the same way (as I’ve just found out!) Both IExplorer and Firefox use different methods to acheive this, and usually Google Chrome is easy to deal with because from a javascript point of vew, has behaved as though it was a clone of Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox! HOWEVER…
BEWARE THE DANGERS OF CODING THEM THE SAME, as your browser will just assume you’re using Firefox, and anything that Google Chrome does not do, will go by undetected. No Warnings, No Nothing! (Which is fine just so long as the code it’s skipping wasn’t majorly important) but generally speaking, if you’ve gone to all the trouble to code it in XML, then there’s a likelyhood that the code it has skipped is VERY IMPORTANT INDEED, and thus losing it could be disasterous! However, thankfully this handy Google Chrome detection will help me to further seperate the code being used, and I can get to work on figuring out how the google has messed with the XML part! …Wish me luck!!

Commenter Avatar November 05 / #

Just downloaded chrome its blazing fast almost as fast as FireFox Beta 3 “hacked”.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that When it comes to Frames or basically anthing that you resize with Javascript, that Chromes height variable is typically off by about 25px, however this just might be because of programing a resizing frame for all 3 browers. Because I checked the variables with Chromes nifty Inspector tool and the clientHeight variable is exact. So im guess it’s just another incompatability of IE to any other browser again. Altho IE still does nice color shading and easy margins lmao. =D.

Commenter Avatar January 09 / #
James Umokoro says:

Chrome is very nice.. but it would be nicer if it could show error messages like that that of the Windows Internet Explorer. Or may be should have a debugger. Guys don’t you think it will make good sense? Love the work these guys have done.

Commenter Avatar June 11 / #
Sameer says:

Browser detection is fine how to change the input type using js in chrome.

Commenter Avatar August 18 / #

Chrome is nice, but still rather unstable I think

Commenter Avatar October 17 / #
Mis_P says:

@Martin: did you find a way to differentiate user agent for safari and chrome..because I am trying to extract the “chrome” from the user agents long string but still it does not work.

Commenter Avatar December 05 / #

Hi that is a great news for all people like me….I don’t know a lot about wave and thus that is very new for me…but that is a very very good news for me because collaboratively I can use their service along with twitter and many other features at a time that is nice…thanks Google and thanks web master of this site..

Commenter Avatar December 07 / #
Rhoel says:

@Htoo Tay Zar:

i have discovered the interpretation of the Khmer (Cambodian) Unicode font is tiny in Chrome when compared to FF and IE. So maybe a need to script around to make the font size readable.

Not a big issue.

Do like Chrome though – can’t wait to see the roll out on Chrome OS

Rhoel
Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

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