Something I came across being very important when animating with jQuery was the way different browsers can handle the load. Internet explorer was substantially slower than the other rivals, with Chrome being fastest (although seemingly IE9 has caught up speed wise). This was especially apparant while using Cufon + animation, yeilding very jerky results while animating in IE8 and below. Another issue was IE8s lack of support for animating alpha. So what was needed was a way to handle slightly different animations depending on which Browser is being used to view the website.  jQuery.browser makes this very simple: with both conditional handlers for browser type and browser version.

So for example we want to have alternative content for Internet Explorer users, we can use:

if ( $.browser.msie ) {
$(‘.mydiv’).html(‘<p>Hi There, you’re using Internet Explorer</p>’);
}

And we can take this further by checking the version of the browser:

if ( $.browser.msie ) {
if ($.browser.version <= 6)
{
$(‘.mydiv’).html(‘<p>Hi There, you’re using Internet Explorer 6 =(</p>’);
}
}

Very simple stuff! It’s best practice to try and avoid browser specific code where possible, but in certain situations it can be an essential little piece of knowledge. For more info check out the jQuery documentation.