Hacking around with PHP to have a better solution than get_browser()

PHP’s native get_browser() function parses this file and provides you with a complete set of information about every browser’s details, But it requires the path to the browscap.ini file to be specified in the php.ini browscap directive which is flagged as PHP_INI_SYSTEM.

Since in most shared hosting environments you have not access to the php.ini file, the browscap directive cannot be modified and you are stuck with either and outdated database or without browscap support at all.

Browscap is a standalone class for PHP >=5.3 that gets around the limitations of get_browser() and manages the whole thing. It offers methods to update, cache, adapt and get details about every supplied user agent on a standalone basis. It’s also much faster than get_browser() while still returning the same results.

https://github.com/GaretJax/phpbrowscap