Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.jquery.com

211–220 of 237 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An old boring website? No, that isn't that difficult. Try to do an interactive webap.

AFAICT, jQuery is a general purpose library, not one meant to build bleeding edge web apps.

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

#212
post #207
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "single box" needs to be able to support enough instances for our entire development team. This is more hardware and IT maintenance costs. Also, if we are doing network maintenance and wifi goes down, developers have to stop working. The point is - even that solution costs time and money.

Sure, but why not Sauce Labs Scout + OnDemand? That was the whole reason we built it. I don't like running VM's on my machine, I prefer them to be perfectly maintained and run in the cloud. Is there anywhere it fails to meet your teams needs? Genuinely curious if it's a product fail or a marketing problem. Disclaimer: Used to work at Sauce Labs, not anymore.

Deploying VMs to an external cloud provider for the simple task of testing a browser is very heavy handed.

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

#213
post #209
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry - you are right. 1) 90% of our visual front-end bugs come from IE, sometimes only showing up in certain versions of IE7. 2) Our mac developers either need a license for VMware fusion or multiple boxes/VMs to test IE 7/8/9 which of course behave very differently. Maintaining these boxes, Windows licenses, and VMware licenses adds additional stress to IT, and the context switching for our developers is expensive.…

1) Maybe it's a design problem, do you really have to provide the exact same experience to everyone? 2) As others have said, there are "free" (of course, there's a cost in setting up) alternatives. 3) Indeed, we bumped every iMac RAM here as well. It's very cheap, though. 4) Well, not really. Any logical piece of software can (and should) be isolated to run by itself. That's how you unit test them. This is the kind o…

1) Yes. Our user experience, look and feel, and "funness" is part of the brand experience that we can't compromise. Does Apple compromise?

2) Nothing is free if you are buying more hardware. Considering the costs of supporting Chrome/Firefox are very incremental, doing anything other than running the browser natively increases time and cost.

3) Cheap yes, but you have to do it, and its not like buying one piece of hardware. You have to do it for every person. Better, but not great. No one likes running VMs on their boxes because it still crawls, even with 2 cores and 8GB ram.

4) Don't disagree with you at all. I was against this design decision from the beginning but lost that battle. It doesn't change the fact that we need to test all of it.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS. What time limit? The blog post says jQuery 1.9 will be supported even after 2.0 is released, and that the two APIs will be the same.

If you look further into my comment you'll see I mention when 2.1 comes out. I doubt they will be back-porting 2.1 features into 1.9, and thus the time limit.

Only if you can't live without some feature in 2.1 and can't backport it yourself.

What jQuery 2.1 feature can't you live without?

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

#215
post #213
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Maybe it's a design problem, do you really have to provide the exact same experience to everyone? 2) As others have said, there are "free" (of course, there's a cost in setting up) alternatives. 3) Indeed, we bumped every iMac RAM here as well. It's very cheap, though. 4) Well, not really. Any logical piece of software can (and should) be isolated to run by itself. That's how you unit test them. This is the kind o…

1) Yes. Our user experience, look and feel, and "funness" is part of the brand experience that we can't compromise. Does Apple compromise? 2) Nothing is free if you are buying more hardware. Considering the costs of supporting Chrome/Firefox are very incremental, doing anything other than running the browser natively increases time and cost. 3) Cheap yes, but you have to do it, and its not like buying one piece of ha…

1) I don't get it. Completely dropping support would not break the brand experience, but allowing use via a simpler experience would?

2) The hardware issue was addressed in 3. Also, I don't follow, what do you mean by "the costs of supporting Chrome/Firefox are very incremental?"

3) That's a fallacy, actually. You're both proposing and confirming that "No one likes running VMs on their boxes because it still crawls". I, for one, run Windows XP VMs on my 4GB Core i3 iMac with no burden on the host OS at all. Some people might suffer with it? Yes, but some people could try tuning their setup for their needs.

4) Agreed.

Anyhow, we both know that the kernel of your argument is the first topic. I could convince you that the benefits outweigh the costs in 2, 3 and 4. But if your mindset is focused on giving the very same experience to every agent that can reach your app, or giving no experience at all; this argument is already over.

Also, saying that Apple does X or Y means absolutely nothing. Even if your company were almost exactly the same as Apple in every competitive aspect, nothing can assure that copying its culture would also lead you to a successful path. Actually, I believe history tells us the opposite.

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

#216
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.

> Like supporting old browsers is that hard/expensive.

OK, make your new website work in Netscape 4.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont have any experience developing for govt, so for all I know the barrier against installation of CF may be insurmountable. Have you ever tried? It really is extremely painless and would result in a net + in terms of security.

Definitely insurmountable in the environment of many of our users. They're doctors working with medical data, so IT has to certify anything new installed. So they're stuck with IE6, because that was the latest & greatest when large custom web-based applications really took off, so they're all certified for IE6 only and would have to be replaced at enormous cost before the users can be allowed to upgrade (or install c…

ahh that's a real shame. I guess the best you can hope for is a change of policy when xp is EOLed. Even if it's just an upgrade to ie8 that would make your life more bearable.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for long: http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/

1. You can buy things even if they're taxed. 2. You can buy things from places that are not kogan.

And when more places start doing this, or quietly dropping support for IE6, 7 and 8? People are going to start clamoring to be able to install a decent browser.

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

#219
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An old boring website? No, that isn't that difficult. Try to do an interactive webap.

AFAICT, jQuery is a general purpose library, not one meant to build bleeding edge web apps.

There's different versions of jQuery. If you require a version that supports older browsers, you might not be able to use the bleeding-edge version. The current libraries will continue to work as they always have. There's no reason for newer versions to be limited by outdated browsers. Developers are free to choose the version they want to use.

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

#220
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…

People won't switch because sites are hectoring them with lectures about how something they might be fine with is actually awful. All it would take for them to switch are compelling apps (whatever definition of "compelling" applies to each person) which exploit the capabilities of, and therefore require, the newer browsers, and whose existence is advertised to them. Not "your browser is bad and you should feel bad", but "this site is awesome and will make you feel awesome, there's just one thing - you need to install this awesome browser to get your ticket to awesomeville". Same as any other platform.
Post reply on HN