What is the difference between Request.UserAgent and Request.Browser?

Question

Here is my code below :

    User_Info.Add(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.UserAgent) ? Request.UserAgent : string.Empty);//4:UserAgent

    HttpBrowserCapabilities browser = Request.Browser;
    User_Info.Add(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(browser.Browser) ?  "Name : " + browser.Browser + " | " +
                                                            "Type : " + browser.Type + " | " +
                                                            "MajorVersion  : " + browser.MajorVersion + " | " +
                                                            "MinorVersion  : " + browser.MinorVersion : string.Empty);//5:UserBrowser

What is the difference between Request.UserAgent and Request.Browser?
I couldn't understand those UserAgent strings!
Would you please show some examples with explanation?

Answer 1

UserAgent gives you a raw string about the browser. It might look like this:

User Agent :: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.2914)

Request.Browser will give you HttpBrowserCapabilities object which will have browser version information along with some extra information regarding the capabilities of the browser. For example:

1. Whether browser supports Frames
2. If it supports cookies ?
3. Supports JavaScripts ?
4. Supports Java Applets ? etc.

Look at the following sample code:

HttpBrowserCapabilities bc = Request.Browser;
Response.Write("<p>Browser Capabilities:</p>");
Response.Write("Type = " + bc.Type + "<br>");
Response.Write("Name = " + bc.Browser + "<br>");
Response.Write("Version = " + bc.Version + "<br>");
Response.Write("Major Version = " + bc.MajorVersion + "<br>");
Response.Write("Minor Version = " + bc.MinorVersion + "<br>");
Response.Write("Platform = " + bc.Platform + "<br>");
Response.Write("Is Beta = " + bc.Beta + "<br>");
Response.Write("Is Crawler = " + bc.Crawler + "<br>");
Response.Write("Is AOL = " + bc.AOL + "<br>");
Response.Write("Is Win16 = " + bc.Win16 + "<br>");
Response.Write("Is Win32 = " + bc.Win32 + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports Frames = " + bc.Frames + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports Tables = " + bc.Tables + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports Cookies = " + bc.Cookies + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports VB Script = " + bc.VBScript + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports JavaScript = " + bc.JavaScript + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports Java Applets = " + bc.JavaApplets + "<br>");
Response.Write("Supports ActiveX Controls = " + bc.ActiveXControls + "<br>");
Response.Write("CDF = " + bc.CDF + "<br>");

For comparing browser version against a user agent, you would have to use string operations (Contains), whereas in case of Request.Browser you can compare against a property.

Answer 2

Request.Browser is different from Request.UserAgent. UserAgent gets the raw user agent string of the client browser, and Request.Browser gets you the information about the browser capabilities. You wont get all the browser capabilities with the UserAgent string.