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prateekdayal
This is our weekend hack. Would love your feedback.

The app is primarily for people doing customer support to understand if their users are using supported browsers and right plugins (like flash etc).

Info link - https://aboutmybrowser.com/?nr (no-redirect since we want it to be zero click for your users)

rplnt
If you access a direct link (to someone's browser info) the page should make it clear that it's not your browser you are visiting. Now it says "share your browser info" even if you opened some other url.
bmj1
Nice idea - this could be achieved by dropping a cookie.
ashitvora
I guess what he is trying to do is, ask user's OS, Browser, whether Flash or any other plugin is installed or not when you are talking to customer for support. Not to gather stats.
ashastry
Thanks for the feedback. We will fix this..
emilsedgh
Seems nice. A couple of things: 1) It would be cool if it gets shorter urls so it would be usable on phone. 2) It detects Safari on Linux for me. Im using Konqueror. https://aboutmybrowser.com/848858317
prateekdayal
Thanks for pointing out the bug. We'll work on it. 'Safari on linux' does sound weird, doesn't it? :)

We'll work on the urls. As such the layout scales down on phones (thanks to Bootstrap 2.0)

brianfryer
Great tool! I can definitely see myself using this :-)

I viewed the site with Chrome for iOS (on an iPad 2), and it detected "Safari on OS/2". Is that correct?

[dead] ashastry
We have fixed this error now. Please check it out...
ashitvora
nice one. simple but very useful when you are dealing with non-tech users.
sassyboy
As geeks, we tend to forget sometimes how trivial questions such as "What browser are you using" leave some users completely stumped. Heck, there may be so many people who do not even know the meaning of a browser. This seems a simple yet great way to get the required info. Kudos!
robbiea
I think if you add a "share via e-mail" feature right underneath it, it would be awesome.
aidos
There's also supportdetails.com which has a feature to let you customise [1] the recipient email etc so people can easily forward the details through to you.

[1] http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=example&sender=em...

ashastry
Yep. That one looks good and showed up in our research as well. In aboutmybrowser, we generate a custom url for you so you can copy the url and share your info easily. No need to copy all the text or enter your email to share the info. Just better to protect your privacy and anonymity.

More of the similar products out there focus on users who want to find out their info (basically savvy users). This is for support agents who want to find out their users' browser info without asking them to go through so much trouble

pbhjpbhj
>No need to copy all the text or enter your email to share the info. //

So a support provider has to send the user to your site. The user then has to copy the URL, paste it in to a message, lookup the person making the request for the details and forward them. The requester has to then go to your site and enter the URL in order to retrieve the details.

Compared with the support supplier sending an email with a link to http://supportdetails.com/?sender_name=Example&sender=em... and the user clicking "send details" and the requester getting the details in their email.

All to protect the company offering the service from getting your email address?

mustardhamsters
Most of my tech support requests come in via email anyway. I send them to supportdetails.com, and they're very happy to send me an email. We have a tech-savvy userbase, so usually they say they liked it so much they'll use it themselves.
prateekdayal
Thanks for the feedback. We have added a share widget which also has share by email as an option. Please check it out
mikerastiello
We used that as a jumping off point when we created my company's support portal. We added a contact form and text box for the user to describe the issue, as well as the option to attach a screen shot. Once submitted it creates a ticket in our support system.

It has allowed us to troubleshoot issues quicker without having to do the back and forth of trying to get our customer to figure out what OS or browser they are running.

emillon
I find it interesting that Flash is detected even with FlashBlock enabled. It seems that the add-on only prevents its display.
sordina
I noticed that in Chrome too, but with 'click to play' turned on for plugins in the preferences... Not sure if it's a good or bad thing actually, since I'd rather sites assume I'm displaying flash so that I can continue blocking the flash content they want to show me, rather than them displaying it via other means.
sanat
I use http://supportdetails.com/ . It's solved this problem for me since atleast the last 4 years.
dkroy
I actually prefer the one you linked, over this new one. I like the layout, and sharing options better.
nodata
(non-ambiguous) letters rather than numbers would be better to keep the urls short.
jasonkester
Cool. How about adding a way to automatically fire off a web hook after sniffing the information. As in:

"Thanks for reporting the issue. Would you mind following this link so that we can get some information about your web browser? https://aboutmybrowser.com/?to=mysite.com/browserhook

Or better, let me sign up for an account and register a named webhook with you, as in, https://aboutmybrowser.com/mysite, that would automatically forward information from anybody hitting it to the webhook url I'd configured at mysite.com.

That would rock.

prateekdayal
Yep! That's the next step. We wanted to get the MVP out and get feedback from the community. Please follow us on Twitter to stay updated (again, no bullshit and just product announcements) - https://twitter.com/aboutmybrowser
anonymoushn
It looks like it detects the resolution of the primary display. I'm not sure if there's a way to pick the "right" display, though.

  Screen Width        1440
  Screen Height       900
  Browser Width       2560
  Browser Height      1368
w0utert
I'm not really sure if it's a glitch in the tool or that the resolution is (deliberately?) misreported by my browser, but on my iPad 3 it reports 1024x768.

A nice extension to this would be to add some kind of database of popular mobile devices, so you can detect the device type from the reported attributes. I think you coud extract some interesting device usage statistics out of it.

NLips
That's the size reported by Safari so that pages scale correctly for a "retina" screen.
JoeAltmaier
Yeah my 1920X1200 Dell display reports at 1536X960
ken
For Firefox on OS X, at least, it seems to be reporting the resolution of the display which the window is mostly on.

I think this corresponds to the display which holds the backing store for the window, but I'm not sure -- if you drag a window between a HiDPI display and a normal display, for example, it's rendered as a HiDPI window if it's mostly on the HiDPI display, and vice versa.

I agree that I don't know if it's possible to do the "right" thing, or even exactly what the "right" thing would be.

Rulero
This is certainly helpful, thanks for sharing this.
ottbot
It's unfortunate that when using IE, both this and supportdetails.com only give versions as specific as "Windows XP" and "IE 8", whereas I get more detailed version info using Chrome on OS X.

I'm trying to track down an IE issue and would love for our support team to get customers to use something like this. But we need more info to make it easier to reproduce the problem.

prateekdayal
Can you please give us the permalink you get? Here or at prateek@supportbee.com so we can debug this? We want to make this super useful. This is just a MVP.
ottbot
Here you go:

https://aboutmybrowser.com/890034160

Windows XP on Virtuabox

prateekdayal
Thanks. Sorry I am confused. Did it get something wrong or were you expecting more info?
ottbot
Ah, I probably could have been more clear. I was expecting (hoping) for more information. It doesn't seem to have anything wrong, but it would be great if it was possible to get a more detailed version number, like 8.0.6001.18702.
Udo
A quick look at your User Agent string suggests there is no detailed version number made available by your browser in the first place.
pdw
> We're sorry, but something went wrong.

Iceweasel 15 (rebadged Firefox) on Linux.

prateekdayal
Oops :( Can you please pass on the url string you got? (That has all your info)
gingerjoos
same as above. UA string : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.7 Iceweasel/10.0.7
anonova
Same. I'm on a mobile browser though (Mobile Chrome).

https://aboutmybrowser.com/1027953242

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.0.4; cm_tenderloin Build/IMM76L) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19

[dead] ashastry
We have fixed this error now. Please check it out...
tech-no-logical
The 'javascript : true' is redundant as this doesn't work with javascript disabled. Other than that : nice.
aw3c2
Actually I visited it with Javascript disable. Saw the note about details needing JS, smiled in anticipation of Javascript being used to sniff details, got "javascript: false". I think they save the results but use JS to display only (bleh...).
nemetroid
If I visit with an odd User Agent I get a server error.

https://aboutmybrowser.com/47523742 is an example where I used User Agent Switcher in Firefox with the UA string

    Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.5; FreeBSD) KHTML/4.5.4 (like Gecko)
prateekdayal
Thanks for reporting this. Only when we started working on this we realized how complex user agent string parsing is. We will be improving it with all the feedback so you can expect things to be better in a day or so.
ck2
Woefully incomplete - you aren't even exploring navigator.plugins, installed fonts, DOM storage settings, etc.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes

prateekdayal
Sorry to disappoint you. This is just a MVP and we will be adding a lot more stuff (including Java detection) in the coming weeks. Please follow us on Twitter to stay updated (since we don't want to capture your email address)
andyjohnson0
I think you are being a bit hard on them. This is aimed at tech support scenarios. Its not a privacy tool.
heyitsnick
It's this kind of negativity I wish I never read on Show HN threads. Woeful? Seriously? Deplorably bad or wretched[1]? It's an MVP of an interesting concept and this is how you respond?

1. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/woefully

citricsquid
I thought ck2 was joking because the one he linked includes everything and was designed to show just how information you leak; not to exist as a way to quickly get a users info.

Maybe not, though.

MartinCron
I can't even begin to count the times where I was unable to resolve a support problem because I didn't know the client browser's... font support?

Yeah, woeful indeed.

_pferreir_
Great idea. I lost the count to the number of times I had to ask this question. This will really help a lot.
caio1982
lynx -dump http://aboutmybrowser.com We're sorry, but something went wrong.

Really, guys? It's mothereffing lynx!

asdfaoeu
Actual site is down I think. I got that error in chrome on android.
pavanky
It is identifying both chromium and firefox as chrome on Linux. The User Agent String looks suspicious too..

http://imgur.com/eYdlo,XjsOH

EDIT: I am on ArchLinux if that helps.

keithpeter
Oddly enough, it is identifying Firefox 15 and Chrome 21 correctly on Ubuntu 12.04. I'm on an open wifi in a cafe.
wreckimnaked
Yeah, Chromium on OS X is also getting identified as Chrome.
gog
Android info also doesn't show up...
IndigoIRIS
You should be grabbing this on your contact us page for your technical support enquiries and then, in your message to whomever gets the requests, add a bit add the bottom with 'for technical support use' followed by the browser information.