How to Enable Barcode Scanning from Mobile Browsers

Last Updated on 2021-06-10

You have a requirement to enable web-based barcode scanning for your mobile browsers. But, you don’t want to do it via an app since it requires extra effort for both users and developers. You also want to enable users to read barcodes from your website via the camera of a mobile phone or tablet. How do you do that?

In this post, we introduce a solution for barcode scanning from mobile browsers using Dynamsoft Barcode Reader (DBR) SDK.

There are mainly two ways to decode barcodes in mobile browsers:

• Server-Side scanning
• Client-Side scanning

Read Barcodes from Live Camera Feed on Client Side

Our JavaScript barcode reader API based on WebAssembly technology enables you to read barcodes from live video stream within desktop and mobile browsers. It supports real-time localization and decoding from live camera feed.

Supported barcodes include:

• • 1D Barcode
  • QR Code
  • DataMatrix
  • Aztec Code
  • PDF417
  • More barcode types

See it in action

With the JavaScript API, you can easily integrate barcode scanning into your browser-based workflow. On mobile phones, your customers and employees will no longer have to download an app.

For browser compatibility and performance data with different browsers, please refer to Best Practices for Increasing Speed with Dynamsoft Barcode Reader JavaScript Edition

Read Barcodes on Server Side

Users can access the web page via their mobile browsers, capture an image or load an existing one, upload it to the server, and the server will decode the barcode content, and then return the decoded result.

The video below shows how this works:

Server-side barcode scanning demo

Client-side barcode scanning demo