I am trying to figure out a rather stable way to programmatically determine the latest release version number of the chrome browser.
It doesn’t have to be failproof as it’s only a nice-to-have-feature I can blend out whenever the result looks “suspicious”.
- There seems to be no API (is there?).
- I dont want to rely on third parties handling that stuff manually.
- I dont want to parse any website output.
So I ended up fetching git files.
My first approach was to fetch this file:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/chrome/VERSION?format=TEXT
Which gives the latest version number.
From there on the solution is just a preg_match_all away …
Unfortunately its not the latest release version but the latest dev version.
There seems to be no “release” branch nor a “release” tag or something else I can think of neither.
You might answer “why?”… I know about feature detection, I know browser sniffing can be fooled and I am aware of the fact that (every) browser will notify their users when it’s time to update. Still makes sense in my case. On the other hand its solely for display purposes. Nothing is going to depend on it later on – promise 🙂
Any – even the faintest – ideas are highly appreciated!
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Answer
The Chrome team uses the OmahaProxy dashboard to keep track of current versions in stable/beta/dev/canary. If you can scrape that you can get whatever version number you’re looking for.