BAPS (browser and plugin sniffer)
BAPS, apart from being an acronym chosen purely for its its puerile humour, stands for browser and plugin sniffer - and I've just posted it in the scripts section.
As promised earlier this week, this is a utility to accurately detect information about the user's environment, such as browser name, version, language and installed plugins.
This is an area that is famously annoying, since different browsers expose different information to the Javascript's native navigator object, which exists to tell developers about the user's environment. Thus, it's never been standardised.
BAPS clears this up, as it caters for browsers' inconsistencies. It caters, for example, with the fact that Opera 11.52 declares itself as Opera 9.8. And for the fact that Chrome declares itself as, er, Netscape.
It sets a global variable, baps, which is an object containing various information about the user's environment, such as browser, version, language and plugins.
In terms of plugins, it detects Flash, WMP and QuickTime, but you can easily extend it to look for more.
Head over here to download, get usage info or view a demo.
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