Anomalies in IE conditional comment handling (from multiple versions?)

[rodney.reid]

Hi all,

Wrote a program for work which does a secondary check on browser
version thusly:

<!--[if gte IE 5.0]><script>_v=5;</script><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 5.5]><script>_v=5.5;</script><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 6.0]><script>_v=6;</script><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 7.0]><script>_v=7;</script><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 8.0]><script>_v=8;</script><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 9.0]><script>_v=9;</script><![endif]-->

So I ran this a couple million times. one in every 10,000 times
though, I get an IE 6.0 User Agent that will only match IE 5.0 or IE
5.5 on the secondary check!

Why is this? My only thought is these users are installing multiple
IE versions (the standalone ones) for testing.

I did this myself --- have IE 5.01 and IE 5.5 installed alongside IE
6.0 on win2k; when I do this check with IE 5.01 or IE 5.5, the
secondary check comes up "_v=6".

Any Clues? Which .DLL loads/parses the HTML for conditional comments?


Thanks a lot,

....Rodney

 

[rodney.reid]

Replying to my own messages --- call the guys with the white robes!

Found the solution/problem --- "Version Vector" in the registry, of
which there is only one.


Super great article on CC with multiple versions of IE here:

http://labs.insert-title.com/labs/Conditional-Comments_article809.aspx