I need to detect not only the browser type but version as well using jQuery. Mostly I need to find out if it is IE 8 or not.
I am not sure if I am doing it correctly
You can use $.browser to detect the browser name. possible values are :
or get a boolean flag: $.browser.msie will be true if the browser is MSIE.
as for the version number, if you are only interested in the major release number - you can use parseInt($.browser.version, 10). no need to parse the $.browser.version string yourself.
Anyway, The $.support property is available for detection of support for particular features rather than relying on $.browser.