Question

I have found no definite way to detect IE6 using jquery.support instead of jquery.browser which is not supported anymore. Also I need to account for Quirks mode, Ugh!!!

I have seen a couple of posts on Stack but they all refer to jquery.browser and the documentation for jquery.support is a little vague.

Any help on this would be great and thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I think that the authors of jQuery simple don’t want developers to check for which browser is running the application/website anymore. Instead they want us to check different browser features and decide on what to do based on that. It doesn’t matter if it’s IE6, IE8, Firefox or some new browser. As the application developer you should know how the browser support for different features affects the user’s ability to work with your application and you should act accordingly.

$.browser depends on browser sniffing using the User Agent strings which may be unreliable, especially since it’s very easy for users to spoof the User Agent on their browser, not that I would worry about it for layout purposes – if they changed their User Agent then it’s their fault that their IE6 presenting itself as IE7 fails to render the page correctly. 😉

You can either still use $.browser, despite the fact that it’s been deprecated or try to code something on your own. Maybe there’s a jQuery plugin for that already? I know that last time I had to check for IE6 I used that method…