Detect FireOS version with javascript

Question

Is there a way to detect what version of FireOS a Kindle accessing your site is using via Javascript?

Version detection is frowned upon. Why do you want to do that? — Felix Kling, Nov 05 '15 at 16:15
@FelixKling My project links to a web application that only works in certain versions of Fire OS, unfortunately — Matt, Nov 05 '15 at 20:47

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 05 '15 at 16:20

0

I believe that for JS apps you should not care about the Fire OS version, but should care about the Silk browser version, which you can get from the navigator.userAgent string, Kindle devices should have the work "Silk/" in it.

More info here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/user-agent.html

answered Nov 05 '15 at 16:20

Dmitry Sokurenko

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I've tried this, however I cannot find any documentation for which Silk version is specific to/starts at the OS version I need to detect (4.5.4). – Matt Nov 06 '15 at 13:44
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Unfortunately there is no direct correspondence between Silk and Fire OS versions, but the UA strings typically contains the device ID and platform build number, if you have the device you are interested in at hand, you can just hardcode those value. More info — https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-tablets/specifications/04-user-agent-strings. – Dmitry Sokurenko Nov 06 '15 at 14:19
This is what I ended up having to do. I used the user agent to detect the version of Silk the site was being accessed through and responded accordingly. You are correct in that there is no clear correlation between Silk and Fire OS versions, so I just had to pick and stick with it. Thank you for your suggestion. – Matt Nov 25 '15 at 15:22

Detect FireOS version with javascript

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