
We were always proud of OSNews' (and Gnomefiles.org's) mobile capabilities. We spent years collecting keywords to be able to automatically redirect or serve a
mobile-formatted or WAP-formatted (wap.osnews.com) page to less capable browsers. We believe that this script can recognize 99% of the world's non-desktop browsers. We gave special care to not only phones, but PDAs, gaming devices, text browsers, even weird embedded systems browsers that most users have never heard of. Now, it's time to open source our PHP detection script so others can use it on their sites too. Download
here, and read the included readme.txt file too before using. It explains what is what, and what its difference is compared to similar solutions found elsewhere. You can see the work this detection script does in our
mobile statistics (OSNews serves about 1500 pageviews per day on non-desktop browsers via this script).
Member since:
2005-04-01
The istr() function was a quick hack written into a version of our detection file because it was originally written using the preg_* functions. I wanted to convert to strstr() for performance, but the arguments are reversed, and it was going to take some time to either change them or write a good regex to do it for me. Since I was lazy, I just used the istr() function to switch needle and haystack.
In this case, the speed gain from strstr was likely negated by the istr() wrapper, but it does work. I highly suggest that if you use this on any high traffic website, you take the time to convert to using strstr().