Agreed. Let's fix this and then never touch $.browser again.

According to the jquery blog post at http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/22/jquery-1-8-beta-1-see-whats-coming-and-going/ $.browser is going to be dropped completely. They mentioned they'll be making plugins for deprecated features such as this, but looks like it won't be released until 1.9. So I put together a plugin for now, and added support for fixing this bug (that i also ran into)

https://github.com/scien/jquery.browser

Fix #12333. Chrome needs $.browser.webkit too.

Changeset: 465959e75c08f7f1961071832a8c27a205bf05d0

Thanks for the fix, and also thanks b.n.williams for the plugin, in case the worst happens in the future. I know $.browser is already deprecated, but there are some browser peculiarities which can't be solved by simple feature detection.

Seeing as $.browser doesn't do much more than sniffing the userAgent string with some regexes and it doesn't have any external jQuery method dependency, it should still work fine in any future jQuery version without maintenance.

I hope the deprecated methods would be supplied in a CDN copy of jQuery as well, to have it already cached in the browser without generating more HTTP requests as a plugin/extension would. It's possible to remove the Deprecated methods from a custom jQuery build using the grunt command line, it shouldn't be hard to have a core build and a core+deprecated build now and in future. Anyway, even if the deprecated methods are supplied in a different JS file from a CDN, I'll be fine with that.

Replying to [comment:2 b.n.williams@…]:

According to the jquery blog post at http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/22/jquery-1-8-beta-1-see-whats-coming-and-going/ $.browser is going to be dropped completely. They mentioned they'll be making plugins for deprecated features such as this, but looks like it won't be released until 1.9. So I put together a plugin for now, and added support for fixing this bug (that i also ran into) https://github.com/scien/jquery.browser

There's an official back-compat plugin: https://github.com/jquery/jquery-browser

We should probably just get fixes into there instead of having the community creating their own. Otherwise, we might as well abandon the official one.

The 1.9-compat plugin will have $.browser and include this fix, it just won't be around until 1.9 draws near.

The Google and Microsoft CDNs make their own decisions about what files to host, there is also cdnjs.com for some common and popular third-party plugins. But if you need a dozen plugins for a page you're almost always better off combining and compressing them into a single file and hosting it locally rather than including a dozen individual files from a CDN.

#12390 is a duplicate of this ticket.