Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leat­herman

jQuery Bug: IE reports incorrect $.browser.version

October 19, 2008

Warning

This article is old and may contain information that is outdated, irrelevant, or—dare I say it—no longer accurate. Links may have rotted. Read and hyperlink with care!

Update: This is now fixed in jQuery.

I’ve witnessed installations of IE where the navigator.userAgent reported both MSIE 6.0 and MSIE 7.0 in the same string, when Internet Explorer 7 is the one that’s really installed. Turns out, this is problematic for jQuery version 1.2.6, as it parses the double version userAgent as Internet Explorer 6, which may cause problems with your code if you’re using $.browser.version.

You can monitor the jQuery bug in the bug tracker, or see the original research performed by Jamie Thompson. Here’s a better workaround that merges two different approaches used on Jamie’s page, which fixes $.browser.version instead of using $.browser.msie6. This is to be considered temporary until the next (fixed) version of jQuery comes out.

jQuery.browser.version = jQuery.browser.msie && /msie 7.0/i.test(navigator.userAgent) ? "7.0" : jQuery.browser.version;

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. He measures website performance with speedlify and at one point became too fixated on web fonts. He has given 86 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Learn more about Zach »