Detect device's OS in JavaScript
There comes a scenario when you might want to check which operating system the device is running. For instance, when you want to set device-specific download links. For windows, .exe file, for macOS, .dmg file and so on.
Browser’s navigator object can come to rescue in this particular scenario.
The navigator object holds the significant amount of device information such as appName, appCodeName, platform, userAgent and so forth. Among all these, you can utilize the userAgent property which holds the information regarding the browser and the operating system it’s running on.
Running navigator.userAgent in my browser’s console will give the following string in return.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4044.92 Safari/537.36
As you can see, it return the information regarding my current browser but most importantly it has also returned the OS. In my case it’s Linux.
Now we only need to check if this property holds the desired OS by using match() method on navigator.userAgent like so.
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/Linux/i)) {
// Do Linux related stuff
} else if (navigator.userAgent.match(/Windows/i)) {
// Do Windows related stuff
} else if (navigator.userAgent.match(/Mac/i)) {
// Do macOS related stuff
}
It’s as simple as that.
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