Discovering Browser Capabilities

One of ASP.NET’s strengths is that it accommodates differences in client browsers without requiring any special effort from the application developer. However, it is often desirable for a web application to discover the capabilities of the browser making a given request. For this purpose, ASP.NET makes browser information available to the web application. ASP.NET’s Request object (available through the Page object’s Request property) has a Browser property that returns an object of type HttpBrowserCapabilities. The properties of this object are:

ActiveXControls

Indicates whether the client browser supports ActiveX controls. The type is Boolean.

AOL

Indicates whether the client browser is an America Online browser. The type is Boolean.

BackgroundSounds

Indicates whether the client browser supports background sounds. The type is Boolean.

Beta

Indicates whether the client browser is a beta release. The type is Boolean.

Browser

Indicates the browser string (e.g., "IE") received in the User-Agent header of the HTTP request. The type is String.

CDF

Indicates whether the browser supports Channel Definition Format for webcasting. The type is Boolean.

ClrVersion

Indicates the version of the .NET CLR installed on the client (if any). The type is Version (defined in the System namespace).

Cookies

Indicates whether the client browser supports cookies. The type is Boolean.

Crawler

Indicates whether the client browser is a web crawler (an automated program used ...

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