PHP Code to Detect IE Browsers

The extremely buggy way that Internet Explorer renders CSS annoyed me again, this time because of the different way it displays elements with z-indexes.

I spent a couple of hours trying to fix the bug, failed, and decided to go about it another way. The problem lay in a CSS/Javascript rotating banner gallery ,so I used PHP to redirect all Internet Explorer users to a static version of that instead.

Here’s the PHP code that I used. This is the function, put it anywhere in your PHP file:

function detectIE()
{
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) && (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false))
return true;
else
return false;
}

And this is how I called it:


if detectIE() {
//if true, means the user's on IE
//do all the IE stuff here...
} else {
//all is fine
//use normal code here
}