How to get visitor's browser name in joomla 3?

Question

I use following code

<?php
$client = JFactory::getApplication()->client;
echo $client->browser; ?>

I test these codes in firefox,

It returns '18', not firefox. I want to show 'firefox'

Answer 1

Strange, but Joomla\Application\Web\WebClient class doesn't seem to hold information like that. Closest thing would be to get constant name using reflection:

$client = JFactory::getApplication()->client;
$reflection = new ReflectionClass($client);
$browser = array_search($client->browser, $reflection->getConstants());
echo $browser; // Outputs 'FIREFOX'

A simpler way is to use Joomla\CMS\Environment\Browser class instead:

$client = JBrowser::getInstance();
echo $client->getBrowser(); // Outputs 'firefox'

Answer 2

I just called for the client property from a Chrome browser like this:

JFactory::getApplication()->enqueueMessage(
    var_export(JFactory::getApplication()->client, true)
);

and it provided the following output:

Joomla\Application\Web\WebClient::__set_state(
    array(
        'platform' => NULL,
        'mobile' => false,
        'engine' => NULL,
        'browser' => 19,
        'browserVersion' => '91.0.4472.106',
        'languages' => array ( ),
        'encodings' => array ( ),
        'userAgent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.106 Safari/537.36',
        'acceptEncoding' => 'gzip, deflate, br',
        'acceptLanguage' => 'en-US,en;q=0.9',
        'robot' => false,
        'detection' => array ( 'browser' => true, ),
        'headers' => NULL,
    )
)

You are seeing the constant value of Firefox with the 18. You will need to translate that integer to its constant name. I recommend a lookup array then accessing the browser name string by its integer key in the generated array.

$browserLookup = array_flip((new ReflectionClass('JApplicationWebClient'))->getConstants());

JFactory::getApplication()->enqueueMessage(
    $browserLookup[JFactory::getApplication()->client->browser] ?? 'Unknown'
);
// output: CHROME

Relevant links:

• JSE: How to get the name of the browser
• JSE: Joomla browser detection
• StackOverflow: How to get name of the constant?
• JForum: Tip: Use Joomla browser detection Class to display modules

---

p.s. I agree with Sharky's recommended JBrowser::getInstance()->getBrowser() approach; it is rather tidy and direct.

Here is what I found in the JBrowser instance when I called var_export() it on my Chrome browser (on my old, junk computer):

Joomla\CMS\Environment\Browser::__set_state(array(
   'majorVersion' => '91',
   'minorVersion' => '0',
   'browser' => 'chrome',
   'agent' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.106 Safari/537.36',
   'lowerAgent' => 'mozilla/5.0 (windows nt 10.0; win64; x64) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/91.0.4472.106 safari/537.36',
   'accept' => 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9',
   'acceptParsed' => 
  array (
  ),
   'platform' => 'win',
   'robots' => 
  array (
    0 => 'Googlebot',
    1 => 'msnbot',
    2 => 'Slurp',
    3 => 'Yahoo',
    4 => 'Arachnoidea',
    5 => 'ArchitextSpider',
    6 => 'Ask Jeeves',
    7 => 'B-l-i-t-z-Bot',
    8 => 'Baiduspider',
    9 => 'BecomeBot',
    10 => 'cfetch',
    11 => 'ConveraCrawler',
    12 => 'ExtractorPro',
    13 => 'FAST-WebCrawler',
    14 => 'FDSE robot',
    15 => 'fido',
    16 => 'geckobot',
    17 => 'Gigabot',
    18 => 'Girafabot',
    19 => 'grub-client',
    20 => 'Gulliver',
    21 => 'HTTrack',
    22 => 'ia_archiver',
    23 => 'InfoSeek',
    24 => 'kinjabot',
    25 => 'KIT-Fireball',
    26 => 'larbin',
    27 => 'LEIA',
    28 => 'lmspider',
    29 => 'Lycos_Spider',
    30 => 'Mediapartners-Google',
    31 => 'MuscatFerret',
    32 => 'NaverBot',
    33 => 'OmniExplorer_Bot',
    34 => 'polybot',
    35 => 'Pompos',
    36 => 'Scooter',
    37 => 'Teoma',
    38 => 'TheSuBot',
    39 => 'TurnitinBot',
    40 => 'Ultraseek',
    41 => 'ViolaBot',
    42 => 'webbandit',
    43 => 'www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler',
    44 => 'ZyBorg',
  ),
   'mobile' => false,
   'images' => 
  array (
    0 => 'jpeg',
    1 => 'gif',
    2 => 'png',
    3 => 'pjpeg',
    4 => 'x-png',
    5 => 'bmp',
  ),
))