Detecting IE in 12 bytes

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

Andrea Giammarchi had a interesting article which stated you can detect IE in 32 bytes of code. I wondered if this could be improved, after a few failed attempts I found this to be the smallest and fastest way:-

IE='\v'=='v'

Pretty cool eh?

The entry 'Detecting IE in 12 bytes' was posted on January 28th, 2009 at 12:04 pm and is filed under javascript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

13 Responses to “Detecting IE in 12 bytes”

  1. gasper_k writes:
    No. 1 — January 28th, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    cute 🙂

  2. underworld writes:
    No. 2 — January 28th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

    Very good!

  3. Billy Rios writes:
    No. 3 — January 28th, 2009 at 4:16 pm

    Sweeet!

  4. dblackshell writes:
    No. 4 — January 28th, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    detecting everything else…

    FF=’\v'<‘v’

    actually tested it only in firefox 🙂

  5. LightOS writes:
    No. 5 — January 28th, 2009 at 7:34 pm

    Never fail to impress me Gareth. Wish I had your JS skills.

  6. Cd-MaN writes:
    No. 6 — January 29th, 2009 at 5:42 am

    Very cool! You can also abbreviate it to:

    E=’\v’==’v’

    Where E is for explorer 🙂

  7. MJ writes:
    No. 7 — January 29th, 2009 at 6:39 am

    Love it! Now how can we detect IE6 with another dozen bytes or less?

  8. rvdh writes:
    No. 8 — January 29th, 2009 at 8:00 am

    Easy to beat:

    I=screenTop

    11 😉

  9. rvdh writes:
    No. 9 — January 29th, 2009 at 8:08 am

    Or, if you allow a null value as IE proof:

    I=onhelp

    8. 😉

  10. Gareth Heyes writes:
    No. 10 — January 29th, 2009 at 8:25 am

    @rvdh

    Yeah but the problem is that onhelp can be defined by a web site. So if a js library wanted to detect which browser it could be wrong.

    @MJ

    Because this was fun I’m gonna start a new post with some browser detecting hacks 😀

  11. rvdh writes:
    No. 11 — January 29th, 2009 at 9:29 am

    onhelp is part of the window property: this.onhelp, therefore you can check if it’s null (which it should be) if it’s set and true, you still know it’s IE cuz the others will fail this property, And of course, “IE” can be overridden as well. 😉

  12. Gareth Heyes writes:
    No. 12 — January 29th, 2009 at 9:41 am

    @rvdh

    Yes initially I had the same thoughts but when you think of it in the context of a js library your detection has to be independent of the web site code. E.g. this returns true in Firefox:-

    onhelp=function() {
    alert(‘Some web site code’);
    }
    if(onhelp) {
    alert(‘Huh this is FF’);
    }

  13. Aleko writes:
    No. 13 — January 8th, 2010 at 3:28 am

    better decision from me:

    !-[1,]

    returns true in IE and false in all others

    or even

    -[1,]

    returns NaN in IE and -1 in all other browsers

«
»