jQuery - detecting the operating system and operating system version

Question

I have been writing a userscript for the past few months, for my company, and have just designed the main site for it with installation instructions (our employees are based

Answer 1

The Stack Overflow question Detect exact OS version from browser goes into some interesting detail about getting the OS version from the User-Agent header which I believe contains the same information that can be accessed from JavaScript.

Answer 2

You can use this great javascript library: http://www.visitorjs.com/details It is open-sourced recently

Edit: Actually, it is now renamed to session.js http://github.com/codejoust/session.js and to my knowledge, that is the best you can get.

Answer 3

Your best bet is to use the navigator.userAgent property. It will give the windows version number. You can see a table of how the Windows version number map to the OS here:

OSVERSIONINFO

Here is some example detection code:

var os = (function() {
    var ua = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
    return {
        isWin2K: /windows nt 5.0/.test(ua),
        isXP: /windows nt 5.1/.test(ua),
        isVista: /windows nt 6.0/.test(ua),
        isWin7: /windows nt 6.1/.test(ua),
        isWin8: /windows nt 6.2/.test(ua),
        isWin81: /windows nt 6.3/.test(ua)
    };
}());

if(os.isWin7) {
    ...
}

http://jsfiddle.net/45jEc/