Show HN: We got tired of asking 'What browser are you using?' and created this

by ashastry • 14 years ago

521 175 14 years ago

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

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)

rplnt2• 14 years ago

If you access a direct link (to someone's browser info) the page should make it clear that it's not your browser you are visiting. Now it says "share your browser info" even if you opened some other url.

bmj1• 14 years ago

Nice idea - this could be achieved by dropping a cookie.

ashastry8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We will fix this..

deno• 14 years ago

You might consider using (or consulting) Closure Library for UA sniffing. It’s pretty decent and Google actively maintains it.

demo: https://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/closure/goo...

docs: https://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/docs/closure_goog...

roshanonline• 14 years ago

cool stuff.

emilsedgh• 14 years ago

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

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Thanks for pointing out the bug. We'll work on it. 'Safari on linux' does sound weird, doesn't it? :)

We'll work on the urls. As such the layout scales down on phones (thanks to Bootstrap 2.0)

brianfryer• 14 years ago

Great tool! I can definitely see myself using this :-)

I viewed the site with Chrome for iOS (on an iPad 2), and it detected "Safari on OS/2". Is that correct?

anandpdoshi• 14 years ago

great initiative. very useful.

ashitvora2• 14 years ago

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

sassyboy• 14 years ago

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!

robbiea• 14 years ago

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

aidos• 14 years ago

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...

ashastry8• 14 years ago

Yep. That one looks good and showed up in our research as well. In aboutmybrowser, we generate a custom url for you so you can copy the url and share your info easily. No need to copy all the text or enter your email to share the info. Just better to protect your privacy and anonymity.

More of the similar products out there focus on users who want to find out their info (basically savvy users). This is for support agents who want to find out their users' browser info without asking them to go through so much trouble

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

>No need to copy all the text or enter your email to share the info. //

So a support provider has to send the user to your site. The user then has to copy the URL, paste it in to a message, lookup the person making the request for the details and forward them. The requester has to then go to your site and enter the URL in order to retrieve the details.

Compared with the support supplier sending an email with a link to http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=Example&sender=em... and the user clicking "send details" and the requester getting the details in their email.

All to protect the company offering the service from getting your email address?

mikerastiello• 14 years ago

We used that as a jumping off point when we created my company's support portal. We added a contact form and text box for the user to describe the issue, as well as the option to attach a screen shot. Once submitted it creates a ticket in our support system.

It has allowed us to troubleshoot issues quicker without having to do the back and forth of trying to get our customer to figure out what OS or browser they are running.

emillon• 14 years ago

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

sordina• 14 years ago

I noticed that in Chrome too, but with 'click to play' turned on for plugins in the preferences... Not sure if it's a good or bad thing actually, since I'd rather sites assume I'm displaying flash so that I can continue blocking the flash content they want to show me, rather than them displaying it via other means.

sanat• 14 years ago

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

dkroy• 14 years ago

I actually prefer the one you linked, over this new one. I like the layout, and sharing options better.

nodata• 14 years ago

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

jasonkester• 14 years ago

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.

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Yep! That's the next step. We wanted to get the MVP out and get feedback from the community. Please follow us on Twitter to stay updated (again, no bullshit and just product announcements) - https://twitter.com/aboutmybrowser

telecuda• 14 years ago

Yes, this. Even simpler (think phone support) would be to setup http://mysite.com/browser which points to https://aboutmybrowser.com/?to=mysite.com/browserhook and forwards the info to a support agent.

The same idea works well for us with http://mysite.com/team pointing to a TeamViewer session.

anonymoushn• 14 years ago

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

w0utert• 14 years ago

I'm not really sure if it's a glitch in the tool or that the resolution is (deliberately?) misreported by my browser, but on my iPad 3 it reports 1024x768.

A nice extension to this would be to add some kind of database of popular mobile devices, so you can detect the device type from the reported attributes. I think you coud extract some interesting device usage statistics out of it.

NLips• 14 years ago

That's the size reported by Safari so that pages scale correctly for a "retina" screen.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

Yeah my 1920X1200 Dell display reports at 1536X960

ken• 14 years ago

For Firefox on OS X, at least, it seems to be reporting the resolution of the display which the window is mostly on.

I think this corresponds to the display which holds the backing store for the window, but I'm not sure -- if you drag a window between a HiDPI display and a normal display, for example, it's rendered as a HiDPI window if it's mostly on the HiDPI display, and vice versa.

I agree that I don't know if it's possible to do the "right" thing, or even exactly what the "right" thing would be.

Rulero• 14 years ago

This is certainly helpful, thanks for sharing this.

ottbot3• 14 years ago

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.

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Can you please give us the permalink you get? Here or at prateek@supportbee.com so we can debug this? We want to make this super useful. This is just a MVP.

ottbot3• 14 years ago

Here you go:

https://aboutmybrowser.com/890034160

Windows XP on Virtuabox

pdw2• 14 years ago

> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

Iceweasel 15 (rebadged Firefox) on Linux.

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Oops :( Can you please pass on the url string you got? (That has all your info)

gingerjoos2• 14 years ago

same as above. UA string : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.7 Iceweasel/10.0.7

anonova• 14 years ago

Same. I'm on a mobile browser though (Mobile Chrome).

https://aboutmybrowser.com/1027953242

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; cm_tenderloin Build/IMM76L) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19

vacri• 14 years ago

Another iceweasel fault here: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1289055529

Bill_Dimm• 14 years ago

Here are a few more with that message:

Seamonkey 2.3.3 on Linux: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1328892199

Konqueror 3.5.5 on Linux (yes, this is ancient): https://aboutmybrowser.com/4093315824

pdw2• 14 years ago

Debian Iceweasel 15: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3221535922

Epiphany 3.4 (GNOME's browser): https://aboutmybrowser.com/3704839315

breadbox• 14 years ago

Lynx 2.8.6rel.4: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1283428590

Lynx 2.8.8dev.2: https://aboutmybrowser.com/4027520259

Links 2.1pre32: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3138479085

ELinks 0.11.1: https://aboutmybrowser.com/3604611808

(Text-based browsers deserve love, too.)

tech-no-logical• 14 years ago

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

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Actually I visited it with Javascript disable. Saw the note about details needing JS, smiled in anticipation of Javascript being used to sniff details, got "javascript: false". I think they save the results but use JS to display only (bleh...).

irfan• 14 years ago

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

https://aboutmybrowser.com/2691400901

nemetroid• 14 years ago

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)

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Thanks for reporting this. Only when we started working on this we realized how complex user agent string parsing is. We will be improving it with all the feedback so you can expect things to be better in a day or so.

rampr• 14 years ago

Offtopic though, You might want to read how user agent strings have evolved - http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

ck2• 14 years ago

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

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Sorry to disappoint you. This is just a MVP and we will be adding a lot more stuff (including Java detection) in the coming weeks. Please follow us on Twitter to stay updated (since we don't want to capture your email address)

andyjohnson0• 14 years ago

I think you are being a bit hard on them. This is aimed at tech support scenarios. Its not a privacy tool.

heyitsnick• 14 years ago

It's this kind of negativity I wish I never read on Show HN threads. Woeful? Seriously? Deplorably bad or wretched[1]? It's an MVP of an interesting concept and this is how you respond?

1. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/woefully

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

I thought ck2 was joking because the one he linked includes everything and was designed to show just how information you leak; not to exist as a way to quickly get a users info.

Maybe not, though.

MartinCron3• 14 years ago

I can't even begin to count the times where I was unable to resolve a support problem because I didn't know the client browser's... font support?

Yeah, woeful indeed.

_pferreir_• 14 years ago

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

caio1982• 14 years ago

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

Really, guys? It's mothereffing lynx!

asdfaoeu• 14 years ago

Actual site is down I think. I got that error in chrome on android.

pavanky• 14 years ago

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.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

Oddly enough, it is identifying Firefox 15 and Chrome 21 correctly on Ubuntu 12.04. I'm on an open wifi in a cafe.

wreckimnaked• 14 years ago

Yeah, Chromium on OS X is also getting identified as Chrome.

gog• 14 years ago

Android info also doesn't show up...

IndigoIRIS• 14 years ago

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.

prawn2• 14 years ago

White label it for web developers.

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

I think I know what you mean but can you explain your idea? Just the domain or some added functionality? API?

prawn2• 14 years ago

Branded, possibly sub-domains, etc. So it looks like a tool their business created for their clients.

ritcho• 14 years ago

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

tsieling• 14 years ago

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

zackkitzmiller• 14 years ago

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

kibwen• 14 years ago

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/

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

I never noticed that :) Here is the icon set (free for commercial use) - http://www.iconfinder.com/search/?q=iconset%3Abrowsers

notatoad2• 14 years ago

the official icons for all the browsers have licenses that allow them to be used anywhere, as long as they are only used to refer only to their official product (i.e. you can use the firefox logo anywhere you want, as long as you only use it to mean firefox and not some other product)

IANAL, but i believe that creative reproductions like the ones you are using violate the trademark of the actual icon owner, and they certainly violate the branding guidelines of all the browsers in question.

Just use the official icons: it's clearer for your users, and it is what the browser vendors want you to do.

rjsw• 14 years ago

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

victordg• 14 years ago

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

john-n• 14 years ago

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.

emeraldd• 14 years ago

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.

bkardell• 14 years ago

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

christopherscot• 14 years ago

omg thank you

Shorel• 14 years ago

Can you internationalize the texts?

laserbrain• 14 years ago

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

vog• 14 years ago

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?

HyprMusic• 14 years ago

What browser are you using?

ashastry8• 14 years ago

It currently shows this page if it cant parse the user agent. Can you post the url with the error? It would help us debug.

joncalhoun• 14 years ago

https://aboutmybrowser.com/2605932122

This is an error page and I am requesting the page using Chrome (18.0.1025123) on Android ICS (4.0.4 on a Galaxy Nexus).

Something to note - if i check the "request desktop site" setting in chrome it seems to work, but that may be because chrome pretends to be running on linux in that case.

heroic• 14 years ago

Firefox on mac shows me this :P

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

cabirum• 14 years ago

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

https://aboutmybrowser.com/647576433

lordlarm• 14 years ago

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)? :)

josteink2• 14 years ago

Same for stock JB browser.

joe_fishfish• 14 years ago

Also Chrome on JB.

jablan• 14 years ago

Same with Midori 0.4 (https://aboutmybrowser.com/1408260971)

ashastry8• 14 years ago

We have fixed this error now. Please check it out...

jonasvp5• 14 years ago

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! ;-)

pakeha• 14 years ago

Your site correctly identified my browser as Chrome for iPhone. OP's site detected it as Safari on OS/2. Kudos. Perhaps you could share some insights on why this might be.

jonasvp5• 14 years ago

Sure! We're using http://user-agent-string.info/

I didn't feel up to doing the parsing myself...

rplnt2• 14 years ago

Your "Available size" is reporting 1680x1022 for me, I suspect it is supposed to be window size, which is actually 1006x929 as reported by OP's page.

jonasvp5• 14 years ago

You're right, it should be window size. Fixed it accordingly.

davewasthere• 14 years ago

Your site at least works. aboutmybrowser.com failed with two of my devices with a generic message. Your site works perfectly.

Well done!

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Can you please try out aboutmybrowser.com now? There was an issue that we fixed a while back. Thanks!

paulovsk• 14 years ago

Great work. It works well, it identified everything correctly, including the Windows Version (8).

buu700• 14 years ago

Your design is definitely way better in my opinion; much easier to focus in on any specific information immediately (and with no scrolling required).

The only significant usability change I'd make to both sites would be have the one who wants to know the details send a link to a setter URL of a known key (e.g. '/set/foo') which would both display the information to the user and send the information to the server so that '/foo' now persistently displays the same information. That way, any potential user (say, an IT helpdesk person) doesn't require any expectations of the person whose details they want other than the ability to click a link.

jonasvp5• 14 years ago

Thanks and good idea about the setter link. We offer something similar in that every recipient has a unique link: http://subdomain.browser-details.com/?r=2

Using this link makes "Send details" pop up immediately on opening. All the receiver has to do is click "Send".

CCs• 14 years ago

Might be a bug: window size is incorrect with my setup.

AboutMyBrowser.com (correct):

    Screen Width	 2560

    Screen Height	 1440  

    Browser Width	 1932  

    Browser Height	 1271  

    Browser Top		 22

Browser-Details.com:

    Screen Resolution	 2560x1440  

    Window Size	 	 2560x1366

https://aboutmybrowser.com/4031483493

ftwinnovations• 14 years ago

Your design is definitely superior from a usability standpoint. Mad props to the OP for a nice site (though the reports of inaccurate reporting is alarming) but tomorrow I will be going your link to my phone girl. An example is the OP's large logo icon in the center of the page (serves little to no purpose) and the requirement to scroll the page to find extra info. Good on you man!

Edit: suggestion - allow the subdomian feature to work with www in front. A lot of the type of people who will be going to these pages will automatically type www dot in front and it bounces to the homepage. Still of course works, but removes the nifty send button.

jonasvp5• 14 years ago

Thanks for the kind words and sorry to the OP for hijacking this thread. I was really just floored by the coincidence...

Great suggestion, by the way! I added this feature so now adding "www." will go to the subdomain as well.

dsr_• 14 years ago

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.

muyuu• 14 years ago

That's a nice compilation. I used lists from here: http://www.bckelk.ukfsn.org/menu.html to programmatically compile a list for a similar purpose, and a markov-chain based sentence generator that I didn't use because it could generate sensitive stuff occasionally...

zethraeus• 14 years ago

This is especially brilliant in this situation because it would make the OP's website invaluable for over the phone debugging - the (unfortunate) situation in which it is most likely to be used. Numeral lists are anathema to phonecalls.

Great suggestion.

sylvinus• 14 years ago

Beware that "walrus" may not be that easy to pronounce by a foreigner :)

swalberg• 14 years ago

Using the 26 letters from the NATO alphabet might be easier, it's made to be intelligible for non-English speakers over a radio connection with static.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

hoov• 14 years ago

This reminds me a little bit of S/KEY: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1760

q_revert• 14 years ago

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+

ashastry8• 14 years ago

We have fixed these errors now. Please check it out...

tzaman• 14 years ago

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

matan_a• 14 years ago

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.

wldlyinaccurate• 14 years ago

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.

MartinCron3• 14 years ago

I also wonder whether it's possible to detect whether Flash is actually enabled.

You should be able to try to actually do something with a tiny embedded flash application and have that flip a "yes, flash is really on" bit.

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

Great idea.

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

twog• 14 years ago

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

calinet6• 14 years ago

We use this. Works great and is very user-friendly even for people who aren't good with computers.

rlu• 14 years ago

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.

markmm• 14 years ago

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

brittohalloran• 14 years ago

LOTS (they don't read HN)

stanleydrew2• 14 years ago

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.

stanleydrew2• 14 years ago

Here are the three URLs respectively:

https://aboutmybrowser.com/3112024109 https://aboutmybrowser.com/2548601500 https://aboutmybrowser.com/3662672473

I see now that some of the extra info is only discernable via JavaScript. But surely the info about whether JavaScript and cookies are enabled could be shown either way?

klodolph• 14 years ago

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

CJefferson• 14 years ago

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.

antihero2• 14 years ago

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

ashastry8• 14 years ago

We are using normal scrollbars. Can you post a screenshot?

antihero2• 14 years ago

Ah, apologies! I posted that on the wrong topic, I meant to post it about that ivory thing.

tshadwell• 14 years ago

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

msredmond• 14 years ago

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.

MartinCron3• 14 years ago

One thing that has become standard practice for me is to have any "contact us" forms or error reporting pages automatically include all of this information when sending messages. I also generally record persist the browser information on important "events" such as registration and login, so I can refer to it if I need it later.

You don't need it most of the time, but it saves so much time to not have to bother asking for it.

josteink2• 14 years ago

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.

artjumble• 14 years ago

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

derleth• 14 years ago

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.

lemieux• 14 years ago

Didn't work on Android with native browser for me.

ashastry8• 14 years ago

Hi We have just fixed these errors. Please check it out..

fourstar• 14 years ago

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

johns• 14 years ago

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

cnlwsu• 14 years ago

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.

Steko• 14 years ago

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/

SeanDav• 14 years ago

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?

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

I take it you've never done support or tried to fix a users issue?

Trying to find out what browser and version a user has can often be like pulling teeth if they're not an experienced internet users; being able to link them to a page and get all the info you need without a miscommunication is a godsend.

ivankirigin• 14 years ago

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

I'm browsing on a second monitor

aleyan• 14 years ago

I think this is more a function of the browser reporting things poorly in the header. Perhaps some client side javascript can help here?

My multi monitor setup reports even wilder results: https://aboutmybrowser.com/1708443426

notatoad2• 14 years ago

It does the same thing for me - i'm browsing on my primary monitor, but it reports the resolution of my leftmost monitor. I'm guessing there isn't much that can be done other than file a bug report with whoever makes your browser.

newman314• 14 years ago

Reports webOS incorrectly.

justanotheratom• 14 years ago

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

gosu• 14 years ago

Tried it with Conkeror on Linux:

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

DenisM• 14 years ago

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...

slykat• 14 years ago

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

jelder• 14 years ago

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

https://aboutmybrowser.com/4004112543

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

gsmcnamara• 14 years ago

Love it!

helentoomik• 14 years ago

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

_feda_• 14 years ago

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.

ddffnn• 14 years ago

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.

kevin_p2• 14 years ago

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?

kevin_p2• 14 years ago

Update: The page did eventually load and worked properly. I looked at your page source and found Facebook and Google Plus, which are both blocked here - that would probably be what was stopping it working before. Perhaps you should load these asynchronously, instead of waiting for them to load / time out before updating the information?

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

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

gulbrandr• 14 years ago

Related: http://supportdetails.com/

countessa• 14 years ago

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.

prateekdayal15• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We have gotten this feedback from others as well and we will be improving the layout shortly.

xsaero00• 14 years ago

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

Show HN: We got tired of asking 'What browser are you using?' and created this

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