Browser sniffing is a technique used for web development of web applications and websites in order to find out the web browser a visitor is using. This will help to serve the visitor browser appropriate content. During early times, browser sniffing was widely used as there were only two to three browsers available. Browser sniffing was used for website development to check whether their web page design is compatible with the visitor’s browser. As the main aim of website development was to give the visitor a complete look of their site. The developer would not want to face any incompatibilities with the browser as this will be bad on their part. For website development, browser compatibility is very important.
Browser sniffing was practiced to check whether they are able to interpret their HTML, cascading style sheet (CSS) and document object model (DOM) in their visitor’s browsers. Many website development company use browser sniffing for enhancing their site and giving their customers a pleasant experience. If your site is unable to deliver certain part of their site then it will directly affect reputation of the website developer. There is no browser which is well matched with the standards of a developer. So the website development company will have to take care of the customer’s browser.
Although the World Wide Web Consortium preserves up to date central versions of some of the most essential web standards in the form of recommendation, the website development company are unable to create a browser which stays exactly to these standards. Even the implementation of other standards and protocols like SVG and XMLHttpRequest also differs. That is why; different browser will show the same page in a different way. This gave rise to various methods for detecting the type of web browser a user is using and one of the methods was browser sniffing. A web design company uses browser sniffing to ensure that the content is displayed consistently on every browser.
In theory, browser sniffing looks quite uncomplicated and simple. You acquire a user agent string using navigator.userAgent in JavaScript or HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable on the server and parse it consequently. In today’s world were there are more than 5 browsers available for browsing, a website development job has become more difficult. The website development company will have to do a lot of research in order to ensure that they are targeting the right browser or not. Sniffing of the browser has become difficult than it was ever for the website development company.
A web services company has reduced the usage of browser sniffing on the server side as the number of browser available to view your site is increasing day by day. But the website development company will use it if you are implementing a browser statistics application. Hence the website development is done by using such language which is compatible which maximum browsers.