Navigator: platform property

Value

A string indicating a platform, for example:

"MacIntel"
"Win32"
"Linux x86_64"

Note: On Windows, modern browsers return "Win32" even if running on a 64-bit version of Windows.

Description

The platform property indicates the platform/OS the browser is running on.

Theoretically this information is useful for detecting the browser and serving code to work around browser-specific bugs or lack of feature support. However, this is unreliable and is not recommended for the reasons given in User-Agent reduction and Browser detection using the user agent.

Feature detection is a much more reliable strategy.

Examples

Determining the modifier key for the user's platform

One case where navigator.platform can be useful is when you need to show users advice about whether the modifier key for keyboard shortcuts is the ⌘ command key (found on Apple systems) rather than the Ctrl control key (on non-Apple systems):

js

const modifierKeyPrefix =
  navigator.platform.startsWith("Mac") || navigator.platform === "iPhone"
    ? "⌘" // command key
    : "Ctrl"; // control key

This code checks if navigator.platform starts with "Mac" or else is an exact match for "iPhone", and then based on whether either of those is true, sets a modifierKeyPrefix variable to the appropriate modifier key for the user's platform. This could be used in a web UI to tell users which modifier key they need when using keyboard shortcuts.