This guide covers "browscap.ini", a legacy configuration file used by PHP to identify web browser characteristics (name, version, capabilities, OS) from their User-Agent string.

Information about the file and legacy usage

For the native PHP function get_browser() to work, it must point to an up-to-date browscap.ini file. The default path on servers is usually:

/opt/php/lib/php/browscap.ini

Although not recommended for production due to the file size (several MB to load into memory), you can view its content via this script:

<?php
header("Content-type: text/plain");
if (file_exists("/opt/php/lib/php/browscap.ini")) {
    echo file_get_contents("/opt/php/lib/php/browscap.ini");
} else {
    echo "Fichier introuvable.";
}
?>

Recommended modern alternatives

For current projects, developers prefer the following solutions:

1. Libraries via Composer: tools like matomo/device-detector or whichbrowser/parser are more accurate, faster, and easily updated via project dependencies.
2. User-Agent Client Hints (UA-CH): the new HTTP standard for obtaining structured and reliable information directly from the browser.
3. Feature Detection: use JavaScript (or @supports queries in CSS) to check if a feature exists, rather than guessing the browser name.