Browser diagnostics library/package?

JavaScript
1

My company is supporting a web application that needs to run on a bunch of different browsers, including old ones like IE6 at various patch-levels (dumping support for IE6 is not an option, so please don’t suggest that).

We have a somewhat AJAX-heavy site, and on these older browsers users sometimes have issues. We’ve tried to duplicate their settings in our lab, but the amount of info you can get over the phone is limited, and so far we’ve been unable to duplicate many of the issues.

I am hoping to find a library or other package that would allow us to detect browser features in detail (more than just browser version, OS, etc…). Ideally it could probe various javascript features required for AJAX and produce a report that could be submitted via POST method as part of the bug report from the user.

Has anyone heard of something like this? Any recommendations?

2

I’ve never used it, but maybe browserhawk.

3

The technique is called object detection.

See: http://www.cristiandarie.ro/asp-ajax/Async.html

4

Yes, that’s generally what I’m thinking about, but I was wondering if someone had already written such a thing that was well tested of different browsers. I’d rather not have to reinvent the wheel if there’s already something out there.

I took a look at browserhawk, and it doesn’t seem to go into a lot of detail about the actual capabilities of the browser. It seems to gather basic stats (at least from what I saw in the demo)

5

Your company might want to hire somebody, not for inventing wheels, but for knowing what they are, where to get them and how to attach them to your application.

6

You’ll do well then by taking a look at the Bulletproof Ajax book. They use good well-known techniques and supply all of the [url=“http://bulletproofajax.com/code/”]code examples free for use as well.