Detect Metro UI Version of IE

Question

What\'s the fastest method, to detect User-Agent as metro UI version of internet-explorer >=10 ?

Answer 1

I don't believe there is a way to determine if a request is coming from the Metro version of IE10 versus the regular desktop mode version. Metro IE has no unique HTTP headers or user-agent string to identify it by.

Internet Explorer 10 User Agent Strings On Windows 8 64bit

Metro IE10 is a 64-bit application, so you'll see "Win64" in the user-agent string. Regular desktop IE10, by default, is 32-bit and will show "WOW64". You could sort-of make an educated guess based on this, but you would falsely identify anyone who chose to run the 64-bit version of IE10 in desktop mode. As you can see from that chart, the user-agent strings are identical. [edit: as noted in the comments, this won't work for 32-bit PCs.]

I could see why you may want to detect Metro IE, but this type of "browser sniffing" is generally discouraged because it's so cumbersome and error-prone. It would be best to feature test for certain browser functionality that you require using something like Modernizr, if you can.