JQuery 2.0 Drops Support for IE6/7/8; API-Compatible with jQuery 1.9.

Post by Danieru » Fri, Jun 29, 2012, 2:53 AM UTC

barryfandango wrote: post #65

zanny wrote: post #53

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Here is the magic: IE 6 - 8 are not popular browsers. They are only used if the person using them doesn't know what a browser is. And all it would take for them to switch is one webpage they use popping up "You are using an outdated unsupported vulnerable awful browser, here are Firefox or Chrome, take your pick and don't ruin your web experience any more". And the corporate clients could finally get through their he…

Unfortunately it's not a matter of sticking fingers in your ears, I can tell you. If you've got 50-100,000 workstations to worry about, and a couple of intranet apps that only run in older versions (there are more of these than you might think,) upgrading IE could be a fabulously large and expensive project. Still you gotta catch up at some point. The product I work on is dropping IE8 in January, which will cause som…

Post by tambourine_man » Fri, Jun 29, 2012, 2:57 AM UTC

46Bit wrote: post #73

tambourine_man wrote: post #60

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At the same time, the pace of the cutting edge grows faster and faster. It better grow pretty fast. By late 2012, jQuery will still be supporting a browser released in 2001 but by early 2013 it won't support a browser that was only replaced by MS in 2011. Corporate America is not IE8's only domain. There are a lot of people who don't even know what a browser is. And IE8 was the default browser on Windows 7.

You're comparing apples to oranges. A more correct assertion: By late 2012, jQuery will still be supporting a browser replaced by MS in 2006 but by early 2013 it won't support a browser that was only replaced by MS in 2011. It's still a valid point, but comparing release dates with replacement dates just hurts the whole argument.

Post by gnaritas » Fri, Jun 29, 2012, 3:06 AM UTC

eli wrote: post #75

jlarocco wrote: post #69

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You know what? At this point I'm not sure it's worth catering to people who "don't even know what a browser is." They've had nearly 20 years to hop on the bandwagon and start understanding this crazy "internet" thing, and they haven't. A person that behind the times isn't going to buy anything on the internet anyway.

That works fine for your blog, but what percentage of customers are you willing to turn away from your web business?

Post by Silhouette » Fri, Jun 29, 2012, 3:11 AM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #79

Silhouette wrote: post #78

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Which other libraries would those be? (I'm serious.) There were several fairly well known libraries a couple of years ago, but as far as I can tell, jQuery won that battle decisively. It has almost 100% penetration in the projects I'm familiar with that use a general purpose JS library, and it seems to be the default for articles and blog posts I find on-line these days too. Part of that success came from the ecosyst…

The JS community has moved beyond DOM abstraction libraries entirely. Using polyfills is now the preferred way to reach older browsers. JQuery serves a role of abstracting the stuff that polyfills can't fix, or to go all the way back to IE6 where the differences are too great to mess with on your own. Without that, there really is no reason to use JQuery at all.

Post by Zarel » Fri, Jun 29, 2012, 3:17 AM UTC

mkmcdonald wrote: post #25

wycats wrote: post #20

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The premise is that jQuery 1.9 and 2.0 are API-compatible, so you can do something like: New browsers will get a lighter download and a faster runtime. oldIE will still work with all the hacks required to make it work.

You do realize that IE 10 dropped conditional comments, right?