[jQuery] Why the old school browser detection

[jQuery] Why the old school browser detection


Hi,
After Drupal standardized on JQuery, I decided to look into using jquery for
my other work, and started nosing through the code to see how robust things
were.
The first thing that really surprised me was the old-school browser detection
being used. I first learned Javascript in the 90ties, from working on Dan
Steinman's DYNAPI, and at that time we were doing things like :
if(is.ie){
    //do first thing
}else if(is.ns){
    //do other thing
}
But this turned out to be very inflexible, as new browsers started
showing-up, and some bugs showed on different versions of the same browsers,
and browser changing the useragent string.
So since then I've been using object detection exclusively.
(See http://www.quirksmode.org/js/support.html for more details)
So I was surprised to see JQuery using browser detection again.
Does anyone know why this choice was made?
Thanks,
Richard.
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