Re: Plugin Detection with PHP?

On 25 Feb 2001 04:37:21 -0800, Andy Clarke <andy@kinonet.com> wrote: >Is there a way to use PHP to tell whether a user's browser has a particular >plugin? ... >I know that this can be done using Javascript, but as this can be turned >off by the user etc, it seemed as though it would be more reliable to do it >server side (if it is possible). No, it's not possible. The safest approach is to assume the user doesn't have a plugin and then use JavaScript to enable a plugin. In certain cases, there are plugin specific tricks you could play in a detection script (e.g. QuickTime allows a QTSRC attribute which overrides the SRC value - SRC="somefile" QTSRC="plugin_check.php?HasQT=1&filename=somefile"). For the rest, you'll need to use JavaScript. This is complicated by the way Microsoft broke Netscape's plugins object - on netscape, you can iterate over that list very easily. IE has the object, but it's always empty. (You can use VBScript to attempt to create an object of that class and then trap the error if it fails, but that's not particularly elegant)