I have an inherited project and there are places where it's an utter mess. This is one of them. I need to target only IE (any version) without changes to HTML and without JavaScript or any other technology except CSS. ­

#nav li {
    float: left;
    height: 54px;
    background: #4f5151;
    display: table;
    border-left: 1px solid grey;
}

To be clear: Inside the embedded stylesheet and without adding ID's or classes to the tags in the html, I need to apply the border style only if the user is using IE. How can I do this?

Edit: found a solution for Firefox, editing question to reflect this.

Internet Explorer 9 and lower: You could use conditional comments to load an IE-specific stylesheet for any version (or combination of versions) that you wanted to specifically target like below using external stylesheet.

<!--[if IE]>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="all-ie-only.css" />
<![endif]-->

However, beginning in version 10, conditional comments are no longer supported in IE.

Internet Explorer 10 & 11 : Create a media query using -ms-high-contrast, in which you place your IE 10 and 11-specific CSS styles. Because -ms-high-contrast is Microsoft-specific (and only available in IE 10+), it will only be parsed in Internet Explorer 10 and greater.

@media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) {
     /* IE10+ CSS styles go here */
}

Microsoft Edge 12 : Can use the @supports rule Here is a link with all the info about this rule

@supports (-ms-accelerator:true) {
  /* IE Edge 12+ CSS styles go here */ 
}

Inline rule IE8 detection

I have 1 more option but it is only detect IE8 and below version.

  /* For IE css hack */
  margin-top: 10px\9 /* apply to all ie from 8 and below */
  *margin-top:10px;  /* apply to ie 7 and below */
  _margin-top:10px; /* apply to ie 6 and below */

As you specified for embedded stylesheet. I think you need to use media query and conditional comment for below version.

When using SASS I use the following 2 media queries to target IE 6-10 & Edge.

@media screen\9
    @import ie_styles
@media screen\0
    @import ie_styles

https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/moving-ie-specific-css-into-media-blocks/

I also target later versions of Edge using @supports (add as many as you need)

@supports (-ms-ime-align:auto)
    @import ie_styles
@supports (-ms-accelerator:auto)
    @import ie_styles

https://jeffclayton.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/css-hacks-for-windows-10-and-spartan-browser-preview/

Another working solution for IE specific styling is

<html data-useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0)">

And then your selector

html[data-useragent*='MSIE 10.0'] body .my-class{
        margin-left: -0.4em;
    }

After experiencing issues with sites breaking on Edge when using High Contrast Mode, I came across the following work by Jeff Clayton:

https://browserstrangeness.github.io/css_hacks.html

It's a crazy, weird media query, but those are easier to use in Sass:

@media screen and (min-width:0\0) and (min-resolution:+72dpi), \0screen\,screen\9 {
   .selector { rule: value };
}

This targets IE versions expect for IE8.

Or you can use:

@media screen\0 {
  .selector { rule: value };
}

Which targets IE8-11, but also triggers FireFox 1.x (which for my use case, doesn't matter).

Right now I'm testing with print support, and this seems to be working okay:

@media all\0 {
  .selector { rule: value };
}

For targeting IE only in my stylesheets, I use this Sass Mixin :

@mixin ie-only {
  @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) {
    @content;
  }
}