There is a way in javascript to detect ie by using conditional comments. This is not my work, I'll just post the Snippet of James Padolsey from Github:
// ----------------------------------------------------------
// A short snippet for detecting versions of IE in JavaScript
// without resorting to user-agent sniffing
// ----------------------------------------------------------
// If you're not in IE (or IE version is less than 5) then:
// ie === undefined
// If you're in IE (>=5) then you can determine which version:
// ie === 7; // IE7
// Thus, to detect IE:
// if (ie) {}
// And to detect the version:
// ie === 6 // IE6
// ie > 7 // IE8, IE9 ...
// ie < 9 // Anything less than IE9
// ----------------------------------------------------------
// UPDATE: Now using Live NodeList idea from @jdalton
var ie = (function(){
var undef,
v = 3,
div = document.createElement('div'),
all = div.getElementsByTagName('i');
while (
div.innerHTML = '<!--[if gt IE ' + (++v) + ']><i></i><![endif]-->',
all[0]
);
return v > 4 ? v : undef;
}());
An alternative route you could take, would be using the conditional comments directly on your HTML-file, omitting the need of detecting anything directly in JS (this is more preferrable in my opinion):
<!--[if lt IE 7 ]> <html class="msie ie6"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 7 ]> <html class="msie ie7"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8 ]> <html class="msie ie8"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 9 ]> <html class="msie ie9"> <![endif]-->
<!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--> <html class=""> <!--<![endif]-->
Replace your HTML-Tag in your file with this snippet. IE will render the tag corresponding to its version. Then you can look for the existence of the class msie
on the html-tag.
Note that both solutions won't work for IE10 because this version doesn't support conditional comments anymore.