Getting Chrome and Firefox version locally, C#

Question

I am just using regular C# not ASP.NET. I was wondering if I could get the version for Chrome and Firefox. I know for IE you can get the version through registry. From what I can tell Chrome and Firefox do not store that information in registry.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

If you know the full path of an application, then you can use the System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo class to get the version number.

Here's a simple console application that reads the installation paths of Chrome and Firefox from the registry, and outputs their version numbers:

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using Microsoft.Win32;

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        object path;
        path = Registry.GetValue(@"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\chrome.exe", "", null);
        if (path != null)
            Console.WriteLine("Chrome: " + FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(path.ToString()).FileVersion);

        path = Registry.GetValue(@"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\firefox.exe", "", null);
        if (path != null)
            Console.WriteLine("Firefox: " + FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(path.ToString()).FileVersion);
    }
}

Sample output:

Chrome: 24.0.1312.52
Firefox: 16.0.2

Comments

[Rizowski]

What OS version did you test this on?

[Michael Liu]

Windows 7, 64-bit. I used the default platform target of x86 for the console app (otherwise, I probably would've had to specify the Wow6432Node registry node for Firefox, since Firefox is 32-bit).

[Angelo Vargas]

The chrome.exe for me (Windows 7 64bit) was on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER, might as well check both locations just in case, right?

[Michael Liu]

@trukin: If that's the case, then yes. Apparently Chrome offers the option of either per-user or per-machine installation.