WindowsPhone which user agent is correct?

Question

Anyone know why php and jscript output different user agents?

And also, which one is correct?

PHP

<?php print_r($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); ?>

Output: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; Microsoft; Lumia535) like iPhone OS7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537)

jScript

alert(navigator.userAgent);

Output: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; Microsoft; Lumia 535

Which browser did you test this with? Have you read this Feature detection is valued above user-agent detection using a library like Modernizr — Jay Blanchard

FredyWenger FredyWenger · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-19T10:30:37

In our portal, we detect the calling device over the UAS. I have detected some problems with the WP 8.1 user agent string. For WP with IE, set to mobile over the Internet, I receive the "meaningful" UAS:

Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 930) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537

Whereby, if IE mobile is set to "Desktop" or the portal is called over the Intranet, I receive:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; WPDesktop; Lumia 930) like Gecko

So.. the effect was, that our portal has showed the mobile page to iOS, instead of the mobile page to WP. The workaround was to query the UAS for "Windows Phone" before the query for iPhone. It seems as MS tries, to be detected as mobile device on this way (if a page only queries for iOS and Android-devices), what is not nice.
Therefore, there is not "one" correct UAC, you have to support more than one...

WindowsPhone which user agent is correct?

1 Answers