Detect IE version (prior to v9) in JavaScript

Question

I want to bounce users of our web site to an error page if they\'re using a version of Internet Explorer prior to v9. It\'s just not worth our time and money to

Answer 1

Use conditional comments. You're trying to detect users of IE < 9 and conditional comments will work in those browsers; in other browsers (IE >= 10 and non-IE), the comments will be treated as normal HTML comments, which is what they are.

Example HTML:

You can also do this purely with script, if you need:

var div = document.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = "";
var isIeLessThan9 = (div.getElementsByTagName("i").length == 1);
if (isIeLessThan9) {
    alert("WE DON'T LIKE YOUR BROWSER");
}