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javascriptgoogle-chromeos-detection

JavaScript to detect OS in Chrome Version 37.0.2062.94

I'm developing one-page apps. The shortcut should vary from different OSs, especially Mac OS X. Others usually combine keystroke with Ctrl, but Mac combins with Cmd.

Until now, I tried to detect whether the OS is mac or not by this code:

var bMac = navigator.appVersion.indexOf('Mac') > -1;

This code worked well. However, after updating the Chrome to the recent version (37.0.2062.94), it doesn't work anymore.

Is there anyway to detect host OS of browser in JavaScript?

I checked Google Docs in Chrome and it's shortcut worked well with Cmd in Mac and Ctrl in Window. There should be a way to detect OS in JavaScript in Chrome.

EDIT I googled and found some pages about detecting OS in javascript:

Solution

  • It seems that there were some unexpected side effect while upgrading the version. It's still hard to understand.

    When I checked the navigator.appVersion, it looked strange that there was Linux; Android....

    > navigator.appVersion
  "5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.2; GT-I9505 Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.59 Mobile Safari/537.36"

    I checked the Emulation tab in the developer tools, and it looked like this: enter image description here

    It was strange that this tab was usually empty. Anyway after I clicked Reset button in the tab, it come back.

    > navigator.appVersion
  "5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.94 Safari/537.36"