How to Find Operating System Details in JavaScript

As a developer, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of the user’s operating system to ensure that your web application works seamlessly. In JavaScript, there are various ways to find the operating system details of the user. In this article, we’ll explore some of the methods to find operating system details in JavaScript.

Using the navigator object

JavaScript provides the navigator object that contains information about the user’s browser and operating system. We can use the navigator.platform property to find the operating system details of the user.

const osDetails = navigator.platform;
console.log(osDetails);

This code will log the operating system details of the user to the console. However, the output of navigator.platform may not be very descriptive, and it may be challenging to parse the output to get the actual operating system name.

Using the user-agent header

Another way to find the operating system details is by using the user-agent header. The user-agent header is a string that contains information about the user’s browser, operating system, and device type.

const osDetails = window.navigator.userAgent;
console.log(osDetails);

This code will log the user-agent string to the console. However, the user-agent string is a long and complex string that may be challenging to parse. There are various libraries available that can parse the user-agent string and extract the operating system details.

Using a third-party library

As mentioned earlier, parsing the navigator.platform or user-agent string can be a challenging task. Fortunately, there are various third-party libraries available that can help us extract the operating system details from the user-agent string.

One such library is ua-parser-js. This library is a lightweight JavaScript-based user-agent parser that can extract the operating system details, browser details, and device details from the user-agent string.

const parser = new UAParser();
const osDetails = parser.getOS();
console.log(osDetails);

This code will log the operating system details of the user to the console, extracted using the ua-parser-js library.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored various methods to find the operating system details in JavaScript. We learned that we can use the navigator.platform or user-agent header to extract the operating system details. However, parsing these strings can be a challenging task. Therefore, we also explored the ua-parser-js library, which can help us extract the operating system details from the user-agent string easily.