Jquery fail to detect IE 11

27
votes

Just stumbled upon an issue. When trying to detect IE 11 (the beta version currently on air) using Jquery, the result is 'firefox'. The same code detect IE 10. I need to know what browser the user is using in order to display different instructions.

I am testing in Oracle VirtualBox if it matters. The OS is Win 7.

Here's the code:

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-migrate-1.2.1.min.js"></script>
<script>
var browser = function() { 
if ($.browser.msie) return "ie";
var ua = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
if ($.browser.mozilla/* && /firefox/.test(ua)*/) return "firefox"; 
if (/chrome/.test(ua)) return "chrome";
return /*"#"*/'unknown';
} ();

alert (browser); // This return firefox
alert ($.browser.version); // This returns 11.0 - the CORRECT version of IE
</script>

As you can see, Jquery can find the browser version, but not the browser name. Any idea how to bypass it?

4
jqueryinternet-explorer-11browser-detection
Since it's not out yet, I guess jQuery doesn't support it. Just do the sniffing yourself. It's not difficult. - Dave
"I need to know what browser the user is using in order to display different instructions." One of the few valid browser-sniffing use cases. :-) That said, I would always be sure to offer a link to other browser instructions as well, just in case. - T.J. Crowder
You should never need to do that. - SLaks
because Microsoft doesn't want you to be able to detect IE11 so that you can't target their browser specifically to suggest people change browsers or disable functionality based on browser used. - Kevin B
If you were an IE 11 browser, would you really want people to know it? - Erlesand

4 Answers

63
votes

The final solution:

if (!!navigator.userAgent.match(/Trident\/7\./))
  return "ie";

We can only hope that the release version will act the same.

7
votes

It's for compatibility reasons. Client code often performs browser detection instead of feature detection (which is a poor practice). So in an effort to make sure that clients properly use all of IE 11's capabilities Microsoft has made it so that IE 11 will report that it's Mozilla compatible.

So instead of doing browser detection, do feature detection. See Browser detection versus feature detection. There's some great libraries for that, with Modernizr probably being the most well known (and Microsoft ships it as part of the ASP.NET templates in Visual Studio).

See MSDN blog about IE 11 User Agent Strings.

5
votes

The purpose of jQuery Migrate is to allow old badly-written code to run, not to encourage writing new badly-written code. Since that old badly-written code was created long before IE11 was released, it doesn't know about IE11 anyway and will probably misbehave regardless. The jQuery Migrate plugin won't be changed to detect IE11. If you are writing new code, don't use browser detection. Instead, use feature detection.

2
votes

jQuery.browser is long deprecated and has been removed, you should use $.support or a better tool like Modernizr