Inconsistent browser detection

[patricksnape]

I've noticed a variety of ways are used to detect the current browser. There seems to be browser detecting code that looks clean to me, but is barely used. Can we confirm that this code does indeed work? If it does, can we use it instead of using typeof(browser)? Opera's recent announcement to move to WebKit, and thus it's deprecation of the window.opera variable made me investigate our current method of browser detection. It looks like a lot of code will break in the next version of Opera, so shall we get consistent pro-actively?

If there is a widespread approval of this I will happily land a pull request for this.

[honestbleeps]

where have you noticed this exactly? besides needing to change the test for opera, typeof(chrome), safari etc I think are used pretty consistently. If not I'm up for having it fixed to be sure, but I'm curious where? Maybe in some code I folded in but didn't write?

[patricksnape]

L609, which admittedly is only once (and in Explorer code we don't currently support)... It's just submitting my delete cookies pull request I had to switch on the browser type and it felt pretty unclean. Maybe if we just add 4 methods to the browser detect that along the lines of

isChrome: { return typeof(chrome) !== undefined; },
isSafari: { return typeof(safari) !== undefined; },
isFirefox: { return typeof(self.on) === 'function'; },
isOpera: { return typeof(opera) !== undefined; }

At the moment, whenever browser decide to change how they identify themselves means sweeping all over the code for instances of safari, chrome etc. Would be nice to wrap it up in to some helper functions, no?

[honestbleeps]

ah gotcha, that one was added by the guy who made an attempt to get RES working in IE... it never fully got there.

agree a helper function would make maintenance easier!

[patricksnape]

#258 now fixes this instead of two pull requests