[Tutor] How to print the installed web browser

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 1 Sep 2010 03:24:58 pm Ranjith Kumar wrote:
> Hi all,
>      I`m using ubuntu how to find and print the installed web
> browsers using python scripting.


You already asked this question on the 9th of August, in an email 
titled "Need a mentor":


4) Lastly I need to know is how to print the list of web browsers 
installed on a machine.


The answer is the same now as it was then:

You can't. 

I gave a much longer reply back then. But in summary:

* there's no canonical list of web browsers you could look for;
* there's no reliable way of recognizing a web browser short of human 
intelligence;
* it's not even clear what a web browser is.

Obviously a web browser is something that can browse the WWW, but that's 
much, much broader than just Firefox and IE. Python can browse the web. 
Does that mean Python is a web browser? Adobe Acrobat can download 
upgrades over the web. Does that make it a web browser? How about curl 
or wget?

Many applications can read files remotely over http. Some of them can 
follow embedded hyperlinks. Are they web browsers?




-- 
Steven D'Aprano