Show HN: We got tired of asking 'What browser are you using?' and created this (opens in new tab)

Wow, talk about synchronicity... I put up our site doing the exact same thing last night! Design-wise you're definitely ahead, however. :-)

Our version is at http://www.browser-details.com. When you sign up you get your own subdomain - or you define a CNAME under your own domain [premium]. You can upload your logo, define a list of recipients, and your clients can send the browser details directly to one of those recipients/departments.

We still need to change the color scheme (I wanted to launch at the end of the week, so it's straight Bootstrap for now) and finish the translation to German. Also: Premium version!

Feel free to be a beta tester! Also: all the best to the OP, great idea! ;-)

> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

Iceweasel 15 (rebadged Firefox) on Linux.

Let me make a suggestion: for reporting, return a URL with a set of word codes rather than numbers and letters.

https://aboutmybrowser.com/dog_walrus_banana_door

If you figure out a set of 1000 short words that are not too close to each other and easy to pronounce, four of them gives you a trillion possible combinations. If you window it so that the first word is always the same on a given day and keep a record of that list, you can differentiate a billion combinations in a day and have a good check that the information was gathered recently (or else is a thousand or more days old.) http://www.manythings.org/vocabulary/lists/l/ will get you common words, as a start.

Woefully incomplete - you aren't even exploring navigator.plugins, installed fonts, DOM storage settings, etc.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes

With Maxthon I get "We're sorry, but something went wrong" (https://aboutmybrowser.com/398693348)

Also, why are you using (ugly) unofficial icons for some of the browsers (Opera for example)? :)

It looks like it detects the resolution of the primary display. I'm not sure if there's a way to pick the "right" display, though.

  Screen Width        1440
  Screen Height       900
  Browser Width       2560
  Browser Height      1368

This is our weekend hack. Would love your feedback.

The app is primarily for people doing customer support to understand if their users are using supported browsers and right plugins (like flash etc).

Info link - https://aboutmybrowser.com/?nr (no-redirect since we want it to be zero click for your users)

There's also supportdetails.com which has a feature to let you customise [1] the recipient email etc so people can easily forward the details through to you.

[1] http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=example&sender=em...

For me, this site is currently quite useless. It merely shows:

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Is it a bug in the browser recognition, or is the site simply down due to its exposure to HN?

Cool. How about adding a way to automatically fire off a web hook after sniffing the information. As in:

"Thanks for reporting the issue. Would you mind following this link so that we can get some information about your web browser? https://aboutmybrowser.com/?to=mysite.com/browserhook

Or better, let me sign up for an account and register a named webhook with you, as in, https://aboutmybrowser.com/mysite, that would automatically forward information from anybody hitting it to the webhook url I'd configured at mysite.com.

That would rock.

That's an interesting Firefox logo you're displaying. Rather than featuring the generic "Planet Mozilla" globe, it appears to be using a map of Earth centered on Japan. The fox looks a bit sleeker as well.

For comparison, here's the official Firefox branding page: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/brand/identity/

Seems nice. A couple of things: 1) It would be cool if it gets shorter urls so it would be usable on phone. 2) It detects Safari on Linux for me. Im using Konqueror. https://aboutmybrowser.com/848858317

It's unfortunate that when using IE, both this and supportdetails.com only give versions as specific as "Windows XP" and "IE 8", whereas I get more detailed version info using Chrome on OS X.

I'm trying to track down an IE issue and would love for our support team to get customers to use something like this. But we need more info to make it easier to reproduce the problem.

If I visit with an odd User Agent I get a server error.

https://aboutmybrowser.com/47523742 is an example where I used User Agent Switcher in Firefox with the UA string

    Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.5; FreeBSD) KHTML/4.5.4 (like Gecko)

It is identifying both chromium and firefox as chrome on Linux. The User Agent String looks suspicious too..

http://imgur.com/eYdlo,XjsOH

EDIT: I am on ArchLinux if that helps.

The screen size vs monitor size looks incorrect https://aboutmybrowser.com/3056072335

I'm browsing on a second monitor

Please could you make it so it uses normal scrollbars? Fucking with the scrollbars often breaks stuff.

White label it for web developers.

500 Errors:

Lynx on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1909674851

w3m on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1942341369

links on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3183933151

elinks on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3918182904

Also, it works just fine on Firefox with NoScript blocking JavaScript from your site.

A couple of things:

I have cookies and javascript turned off in Chrome on Android. This apparently is too much to handle as I keep getting the standard rails request failure page.

I switched to the default android browser where I run JavaScript and accept cookies and was told I was running Chrome on Linux.

I then went back to Chrome and hit "request desktop site" which just changes the user agent string and was told I had Chrome on Linux. But also was told that I needed to turn on JavaScript to see the rest of the details. Why? It's just text.

Another great tool that does this is http://supportdetails.com/ I like how aboutmybrowser allows you to grab a quick link to share.

I use http://supportdetails.com/ . It's solved this problem for me since atleast the last 4 years.

I don't know how easy it is (or if it's even possible) but it would be really useful to detect what add-ons are enabled. Things like Adblock, Flashblock, cause a lot of trouble and some users don't even know that they have them installed.

I also wonder whether it's possible to detect whether Flash is actually enabled. I disable the Flash plugin on Chrome by default, but tools like this generally don't pick up on that.

works nicely for me in firefox/opera, but doesn't do too well in anything else... although I'd doubt you'd need to worry about them too much, still, it's always nice to see apps like this fail gracefully, if you had a 'this particular browser isn't supported' type message rather than 'something went wrong'

http://imgur.com/a/chkc2

broken useragents..

konqueror: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.6; Linux) KHTML/4.6.5 (like Gecko) Fedora/4.6.5-8.fc14

seamonkey: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110429 Fedora/2.0.14-1.fc14 SeaMonkey/2.0.14

dillo: dillo/0.8.6 < -- wouldn't worry about that one too much :)

epiphany: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-ie) AppleWebKit/534.16+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/534.16+ Epiphany/2.30.6

midori: Midori/0.2 (X11; Linux; U; en-ie) WebKit/534.7+

I had to send five "what browser are you using" e-mails just last Friday. And people never send the OS when we ask. Thank you, thank you for making this.

Might not work properly for users in China. It's telling me I don't have JavaScript enabled, when I do (Firefox on OSX, no weird extensions), and based on the tab bar icon is still loading after >2 minutes. Perhaps you're loading some blocked-in-China script that's preventing your page load event?

nice idea. found it a bit annoying that I had to scroll to get some details that could easily sit above the fold.....i recognise the need for some sort of virality and share-ability, and also that the idea is users will send tech support the link, but perhaps it could be tempered a little and you could push some important details above the fold - for example browser and browser version and javascript on or off.

lynx -dump http://aboutmybrowser.com We're sorry, but something went wrong.

Really, guys? It's mothereffing lynx!

Not a criticism at all but what is the point of this?

This is a genuine question, I have no idea why this seems important/interesting enough to be No 1 on HN.

What am I missing?

I find it interesting that Flash is detected even with FlashBlock enabled. It seems that the add-on only prevents its display.

The 'javascript : true' is redundant as this doesn't work with javascript disabled. Other than that : nice.

How many people don't know what browser they are using or OS? Pretty easy to find out.

As geeks, we tend to forget sometimes how trivial questions such as "What browser are you using" leave some users completely stumped. Heck, there may be so many people who do not even know the meaning of a browser. This seems a simple yet great way to get the required info. Kudos!

Love it, I forwarded it to our QA and support team. One problem seems to be since the url bar is automatically updated (redirect?) with the current results people ended up bookmarking it instead of the just "aboutmybrowser.com" so they saw FF come up as a result in IE and such when opening in other browser.

Nice. We did the same thing a few months ago and released it as open source: http://denimandsteel.com/work/browser-wink/

Please make the 'Copy Link' button the biggest primary looking thing on the page. Like 48px big big.

Hoping to see wget info, tried getting it via wget and it showed something went wrong :-(

https://aboutmybrowser.com/2691400901

I think if you add a "share via e-mail" feature right underneath it, it would be awesome.

Suggestion: Check the version against the latest release and kindly notify visitors if a newer release is available. Provide the link to make it easy to upgrade.

I've often had family and friends ask me why some site or service doesn't work but they don't know if their browsers are up to date. I would love to start by directing them to a site like this and telling them to upgrade if they aren't using the latest version of their browser.

Windows 8 (rtm) is detected as "Windows NT"

https://aboutmybrowser.com/647576433

You don't make a great use of screen space. On my laptop, the very bottom thing on the page I can see is a giant 'chrome' logo. I initially assumed all you were doing is displaying the icon of my web-browser. 2/3 of the screen height is basically empty, apart from one tiny text box.

You should be grabbing this on your contact us page for your technical support enquiries and then, in your message to whomever gets the requests, add a bit add the bottom with 'for technical support use' followed by the browser information.

Latest (regular desktop) Chrome on Windows 8 gets reported as Windows NT.

I mean.. Sure there's probably quite a bit of remnants from the Windows NT codebase here and there, but it's probably not very useful for reporting to support etc.

Any modern version of Windows will show up here as "Windows NT". I think you should be able to determine the correct version through the user agent string. "Windows NT 6.2" is Win8, 6.1 is Win7, 6.0 is Vista.

Nice, but it does not work very well for me (Opera on Mac). It reports the browser and OS correctly, but then it claims I do not have JavaScript enabled (which I do). Also when I click Contact support at the bottom, the page gets dimmed out as if for a dialog, but I see no actual dialog anywhere. So somewhere in your JS code there is a bug that makes it fail in Opera. https://aboutmybrowser.com/2079851324

There's a feature in a few iOS browsers (Atomic, Sleipnir at least) to report as something else to avoid broken mobile sites or whatever.

There are a number of firefox add ons that do the same, this one has site specific settings which is exactly what I needed and it works great:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/uacontrol/

It would be great to combine some public data source about browsers together with what you have like, for example, adding information from WURFL:

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/help_doc.php

Mind their (new) license tho if you plan to use them specifically.

Seems like a great fit so the user does not have to perform their own cross-referencing.

I gave this out in a suggestion couple weeks ago in #javascript on freenode. Nice job, since this is what I was looking for. Previously was using http://www.mybrowserinfo.com/detail.asp?bhcp=1

Related: http://supportdetails.com/

Is it possible to identify certain add-ons in firefox even if they aren't in the user agent string, or is that the only information you get from the client?

Would be cool if it could tell that I use pentadactyl, stylish, ad-block plus etc. etc.

(non-ambiguous) letters rather than numbers would be better to keep the urls short.

Too much scrolling for the amount of information given, otherwise, good job!

Firefox on mac shows me this :P

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14534468/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-10...

We just fixed a bunch of errors and you should see results for android and several other browsers. Please try it out and let us know.

We are working on adding more browser icons. Thank you for your patience

We used something similar for our support requests, a helpful piece to add may ad block. You can check if ad block is on by trying to load some js on a path with usual ad block triggers.

It accurately detected that I'm running Safari on OS/2. Pretty great!

https://aboutmybrowser.com/4004112543

(Actually, Chrome os iOS, but close enough.)

I noticed that it's not at all fazed by user agent spoofing. Nice.

I would rather ask people to send their inquires through my "contact us" form, wherein I could collect all the data I need. Much less confusing to the user, me thinks...

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this one ;) Looks a touch incomplete now but I'll bet it gets a good deal more useful as time goes on.

Findmebyip.com http://fmbip.com/get-started/ is a lot more full featured, I think.

Can you add the info about Flash Player too? Like this: http://playerversion.com/

It doesn't differentiate between the various versions of chrome. Chromium, for example has no Google nonsense in it.

http://supportdetails.com/ still more useful, but nice work.

Great! Java detection would be a really nice feature. Further detail in OS versions would be pretty useful as well.

http://www.whatismybrowser.com/ is nicer looking.

Doesn't work properly. My OS is FreeBSD, site says my "OS Type" would be Linux. Should be Unix or BSD instead.

Great idea. I lost the count to the number of times I had to ask this question. This will really help a lot.

Now if there was an easy way of showing a user where the address bar is so they can type it in...

Can you internationalize the texts?

Great idea.

Would be brilliant if it ran the browser through a battery of capability tests (like HTML5test.com).

It correctly reports Firefox on NetBSD for me but also shows "OS Type: Linux".

Is it really telling me that my stock android browser is safari on mac osx?

FWIW, some information is not showing up for Metro IE10.

Tried it with Conkeror on Linux:

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

This is certainly helpful, thanks for sharing this.

Android info also doesn't show up...

nice one. simple but very useful when you are dealing with non-tech users.

Reports webOS incorrectly.

Love it!

omg thank you

great initiative. very useful.

cool stuff.