get_browser slowing down page load, any alternative?
browscap, browser-detection, javascript, php, user-agent
Solution
I also experiences about a 5s delay when using `get_browser` so i also looked for another solution.
What works great and will surely be up to date for a long time is a lib in piwik:
- Piwik Device Detector
Problem
I have used PHP's `get_browser` function for quite some time now and have never really noticed any lag on any of my websites. However, recently I noticed that one of my sites was taking a second or so more to load at the server end than it should take. I commented out the `get_browser` function and the page loaded instantly. Could this be to do with my server or is the `get_browser` function known to be slow? The website is the only website I have that is running on a windows server, could this be the issue? Or could this be to do with my browscap.ini file (this is updated everyday from http://browsers.garykeith.com)? If there is nothing I can do to speed up the `get_browser` function, are there any alternatives to it? I need to reliably collect the following information about the browser: - What browser it is, i.e. Chrome, IE, Safari etc - What version it is (in full), i.e 10.1 etc - Whether it is a crawler or a bot I am not aware of any other methods of gathering this information from the user agent, would it be better to use javascript (I would rather not as I need the values server side)?