Detecting NON-mobile devices with JavaScript

Question

Before voting for duplicate:

Please read the full question below. I explained there why any of "how to detect mobile device?" is not a case here.

Question (and why it's not a simple negation of mobile dev. detection):

There are plenty of questions about "How to detect an mobile device with JavaScript?" (one of the best, if you are looking for it: What is the best way to detect a mobile device in jQuery?), but I want to ask for something a bit different: "How to detect non-mobile device with JavaScript?".

You might think that when I can make an mobile detection like this:

if(/Android|webOS|iPhone|iPad|iPod|BlackBerry|IEMobile
    |Opera Mini/i.test(navigator.userAgent)){

     alert('mobile');
}

I can just put negation before the statement inside if and that would be check for non-mobile device. Not really.

The code above detects several versions of mobile devices. For all not recognized devices, we cannot be 100% sure that they are not mobile. If userAgent contains one of the typed literals (webOS, iPone etc.) it's surely a mobile device. If not, it can goes two ways:

1. It's not a mobile device
2. It's a mobile device that we did not listed (mistake, exotic device, device released after we wrote the code etc.)

So instead of negating the test for mobile device, I want to write a test for non-mobile (Linux/Windows PC, Mac etc.). That way, if the result will be true, I will be 100% sure that I deal with non-mobile device. In the other case - it's rather mobile, but it's only an strong assumption.

So basically, I want to react only when I'm 100% sure it's non-mobile device, and when I do not know it for sure, I don't want to take any steps (or I will assume it's a mobile device).

How would that formula look? It's safe to test against Windows (Windows Phone or something like that could also use that literal?)? What about Mac, Linux PC and others?

Answer 1

This is taken from here:

var BrowserDetect = function() {
    var nav = window.navigator,
    ua = window.navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
    // detect browsers (only the ones that have some kind of quirk we need to work around)
    if (ua.match(/ipad/i) !== null)
        return "iPod";
    if (ua.match(/iphone/i) !== null)
        return "iPhone";
    if (ua.match(/android/i) !== null)
        return "Android";
    if ((nav.appName.toLowerCase().indexOf("microsoft") != -1 || nav.appName.toLowerCase().match(/trident/gi) !== null))
        return "IE";
    if (ua.match(/chrome/gi) !== null)
        return "Chrome";
    if (ua.match(/firefox/gi) !== null)
        return "Firefox";
    if (ua.match(/webkit/gi) !== null)
        return "Webkit";
    if (ua.match(/gecko/gi) !== null)
        return "Gecko";
    if (ua.match(/opera/gi) !== null)
        return "Opera";
    //If any case miss we will return null
    return null;
};

It's not very elegant but you can add/remove it to your preference.

A second answer, while I understand you are specifically looking for a NON mobile detection, you could also use http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/ which has almost complete mobile device detection (Even the less popular).