Joomla! Documentation™

With the gradual evolution of both Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as a standard and various browser implementations, it is inevitable that style sheets need to be written to cope with various browser incompatibilities. This is particularly true for (the now-deprecated) Microsoft Internet Explorer, but issues can also appear for other browsers. The most frequently used method of handling cross-browser issues is to include an extra browser-specific CSS file in addition to the main CSS file used by the website. This might be specific to a particular class of browsers, for example Internet Explorer or Safari, or it might even be specific to a specific version of a particular browser, for example Internet Explorer version 6 and version 7 may require different style sheets.

The first step in handling browser incompatibilities is browser-detection. How can the type and perhaps the version of the visitor's browser be reliably determined?