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

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101–110 of 237 posts

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

#101
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I the cost of maintaining apps exceeds their value as customers, then they're going to lose support. Don't forget supporting these old broweres isn't free, cheap, or easy.

That's so much BS. Like supporting old browsers is that hard/expensive. Everyone keeps saying that, but I have never ever seen numbers to back it up. Letting it all blow up in the user's face is not an option to me. And I do business with publicity agencies, they don't give a fuck about this stuff, as far as they know everyone owns the latest macbook.

I'll tell you the numbers. We spend way too much effort trying to make our sophisticated web app work with ie7. The industry demands innovation in ux but it's nearly impossible to provide it when you are writing for 4 browsers. In a lot of cases we struggle for hours on one problem and end up writing a separate implementation for that feature that doesn't perform as well.

Now we have segmentation in experience, help documentation, and support.

It's expensive as fuck.

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

#102
post #53
post #5

Isn't one of the reasons for jquery to "abstract away" the differences between browsers so I don't have to worry about it? Dropping support for popular browsers doesn't seem to help me much.

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…

> They are only used if the person using them doesn't know what a browser is.

...or their company doesn't have the budget to upgrade their entire department to Windows 7.

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

#103
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I the cost of maintaining apps exceeds their value as customers, then they're going to lose support. Don't forget supporting these old broweres isn't free, cheap, or easy.

That's so much BS. Like supporting old browsers is that hard/expensive. Everyone keeps saying that, but I have never ever seen numbers to back it up. Letting it all blow up in the user's face is not an option to me. And I do business with publicity agencies, they don't give a fuck about this stuff, as far as they know everyone owns the latest macbook.

No, it's not difficult to support oldIE. Single Column, nothing fancy. But the business people don't want that. They want it to look identical in every browser, and the web designers are scared shitless of losing money to tell them different. The problem is that business people don't know that hours of extra work are required to do this. And when they are told they don't care.

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

#104

Sorry, but this is a disaster. Dropping support for IE6 may be OK, IE7 is a bit too soon, but IE8? I haven't tested my stuff on IE6 and IE7 for a long time, but I still do it on IE8 everyday. It was released in 2009! And it's decent enough, PNG transparencies, etc. jQuery's main raison d'être might have gone out the window.

The app I work on dropped IE7 a year ago, and is dropping IE8 in January 2013. Therefore this is the opposite of a disaster, pretty timely actually. They're pretty clear that 1.9 and 2.0 will have API compatibility so there is an option for those who still have to support oldIE and one for those who don't have to. Seems like the best possible arrangement.

API comparability does not ensure functional comparability. Two code bases too.

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

#105
post #48
post #29

I don't know if I can get behind this or not. I understand their desire but I don't see this as a viable option just yet. I'm not so concerned with 2.0 and 1.9 as you can load the right one, but what about when 2.1 comes out? Are they going to back-port all the new features to 1.9.1? If not then I now have a big fragmentation issue if I rely on anything specific to 2.1. Don't forget that IE 8 is the last version XP w…

People will switch from IE when they have to. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all run well on XP. As for corporate America, they'll wait it out as long as they can too. However, if forced, technology departments are quite capable of installing Chrome or Firefox. I don't feel sorry for corporations who have IE[6-8] only apps. I was there 10 years ago when people said that it only had to run in IE, when I said we should tes…

agreed. They'll only replace those systems when the expense of maintaining them is greater than re-writing. I'm 100% in favor of making it increasingly more painful for companies to hold back progress.

I do have to say that my impression from comments that some devs don't actually comprehend the scope of the trouble for some of these companies. On the surface you might think it's just a lazy IT department who won't upgrade the browsers. But really the situation is that companies built their internal infrastructure using things like ActiveX components for IE and these systems are probably more like desktop apps than web-based apps. They use all of the old IE components to interact with the desktop and do things that may still not even be possible with a regular web-based app. So it is not necessarily that they're surfing the web with IE6 because they're too lazy to upgrade the browsers or their javascript code - rather they are stuck with it because they have huge infrastructure that depends on those old components to run. It's hard to actually understand that now, but at the time 15 years ago it was really cutting edge stuff and MS managed to get some serious vendor lock-in.

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

#106
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I the cost of maintaining apps exceeds their value as customers, then they're going to lose support. Don't forget supporting these old broweres isn't free, cheap, or easy.

That's so much BS. Like supporting old browsers is that hard/expensive. Everyone keeps saying that, but I have never ever seen numbers to back it up. Letting it all blow up in the user's face is not an option to me. And I do business with publicity agencies, they don't give a fuck about this stuff, as far as they know everyone owns the latest macbook.

I say we all just start defaulting anything that isn't bleeding edge IE to the mobile experience. That'll sort em.

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

#107
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is stopping those users from using Firefox?

Corporate; awareness; familiarity

Corporate: the only reason for this is because web apps and sites are written for a particular browser, and not based on standards.

Awareness: when sites don't work, they'll be aware of the problems. The truth is, most users at getting more educated about browsers all the time. It can't e helped that Microsoft has tied browser innovation and standardisation to their operating system.

Familiarity: really fairly bogus as an argument. There is really not that much different between the interfaces of Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox these days!

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

#108
post #48
post #29

I don't know if I can get behind this or not. I understand their desire but I don't see this as a viable option just yet. I'm not so concerned with 2.0 and 1.9 as you can load the right one, but what about when 2.1 comes out? Are they going to back-port all the new features to 1.9.1? If not then I now have a big fragmentation issue if I rely on anything specific to 2.1. Don't forget that IE 8 is the last version XP w…

People will switch from IE when they have to. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all run well on XP. As for corporate America, they'll wait it out as long as they can too. However, if forced, technology departments are quite capable of installing Chrome or Firefox. I don't feel sorry for corporations who have IE[6-8] only apps. I was there 10 years ago when people said that it only had to run in IE, when I said we should tes…

I've just been told yesterday that a banking/financial software web product we're supposed to use works only on... firefox! actually the guy who said it to me didnt know if it worked on chrome/safari/opera, but he was 99.9% sure it doesnt work on IE (infact they had to deploy firefox everywhere). I was quite surprised, I think the financial sector is not so open to technological changes (I still remember talkin to a large fund corp no more than 5-6 years ago and they had security policies that said that they cannot use VPN (or FTPS/SFTP) on the internet and they must use CDN or ISDN with callerid verification for transferring operations) but if this vendor is still alive, it means that probably its product is good enough to make people install firefox (let me add that it's a tiny vendor for small financial entities, so you wont deploy this kind of software in large banks, but it's still quite odd for that market).

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

#109
post #59

Sorry, but this is a disaster. Dropping support for IE6 may be OK, IE7 is a bit too soon, but IE8? I haven't tested my stuff on IE6 and IE7 for a long time, but I still do it on IE8 everyday. It was released in 2009! And it's decent enough, PNG transparencies, etc. jQuery's main raison d'être might have gone out the window.

>[IE8] was released in 2009! Yep, it's ancient. Chrome and Firefox are on average about 3 weeks old. IE8 is over 50 times older. >jQuery's main raison d'être might have gone out the window. Normalization was just one part. It still provides a much nicer API. There are also events, AJAX, effects, and some useful helpers. [].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('p')).forEach(function (el) {console.log(el);}); vs $('p')…

Good point.

BTW that could be written like this:-

  [].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('p'), function (el) { console.log(el); });

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

#110
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I the cost of maintaining apps exceeds their value as customers, then they're going to lose support. Don't forget supporting these old broweres isn't free, cheap, or easy.

That's so much BS. Like supporting old browsers is that hard/expensive. Everyone keeps saying that, but I have never ever seen numbers to back it up. Letting it all blow up in the user's face is not an option to me. And I do business with publicity agencies, they don't give a fuck about this stuff, as far as they know everyone owns the latest macbook.

I beg to differ. It is extremely hard to support so many browsers. Try testing your website on 8 versions of Firefox, 5 versions of Internet Explorer (Mac and PC), 3 versions of Opera and 5 versions of Safari. Ironically, this is what jquery insulates you from to a degree, but at the same time it tends to stifle new features.
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