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Target IE 9 AND less with conditional comments

First off I'm sorry if this has been answered already I just spent 45 minutes trying to find and answer and couldn't come across one that I felt sure about. I'm trying to use flexbox on my site and am trying to target IE 9 AND less for a fallback alternative.

I've seen some hacks and have seen people say to do this:

<!--[if lt IE 10]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="belowIE10.css" />
<![endif]-->

I've seen a lot of people say that doesn't work though. I'm assuming it's because conditional comments were dropped in 10 and internet explorer doesn't understand what lt IE 10 is.

My best guess is checking for less than or equal to 9. I have a mac though and can't actually check this out without something like browserstack.

<!--[if lte IE 9]>

<![endif]-->

Does that work for IE9 and below?

Solution

  • IE10 doesn't understand conditional comments, but that simply means it sees the lt IE 10 and everything else inside as one giant HTML comment, as the syntax highlighting shows.

    So there is no difference between <!--[if lt IE 10]> and <!--[if lte IE 9]>: IE10 will ignore both, and IE9 will match both conditions. You could even go with <!--[if IE]> and that wouldn't be any different.