Trouble getting browscap.ini to tell Safari from Internet Explorer

[Enver]

Hi there, folks. Although this is my first post, I regularly follow Sitepoint articles on the RSS Feed. Also I have more or less learned what I know about PHP from reading countless threads on this forum (and the PHP Manual, of course). Knocking my head gently on the desk sometimes helps.

I felt the need to register and post because of a problem I have with Apple Safari persistently spoofing Internet Explorer on Windows XP. It makes no difference whether I have the browser's user agent set to default (Automatically chosen) or specifically Safari 5.0.3 - Windows. The browser still behaves as if it were Internet Explorer. Perhaps the problem may be down to how I handle browscap.ini but the argument in the code block below works fine for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Explorer.

I use the following to detect the user agent and set a patch of javascript if the visitor is using Explorer on a desktop computer:

       if ($configure    ==    'desktop')
            {
                require_once('Content_Arrays.php');
                $explorer    =    null;
                $array        =    new Content_Arrays();
                $jss            =    ($array->sup);
 
                if (!isset($_COOKIE['support']))
                {
                    $browser    =    get_browser(null, true);
                    if (($browser['browser'] = 'MSIE') && ($browser['version'] < 9) || ($browser['browser'] = 'Firefox') && ($browser['version'] < 3.5) || ($browser['browser'] = 'Opera') && ($browser['version'] < 7) || ($browser['browser'] = 'Safari') && ($browser['version'] < 3))
                    {
                        $explorer    =    1;
                        $support    =    $jss[1];
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        $explorer    =    0;
                        $support    =    $jss[0];
                    }
                    setcookie('support', $explorer, time()+3600, '/', 'www.example.com', 0, 1);
                    return $support;
                }
            }

Basically, I am wondering if there might be a more specific way to query browscap that will unmask the Apple browser?

Note: I understand that user agent detection is an imperfect solution but I prefer the method to using javascript for client-side detection. The exception here is a patch to support CSS media queries in older versions of Explorer.