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

blog.jquery.com

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

#231

Post by gnarf »

51Cards wrote: post #199
dmethvin wrote: post #123

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.

The plan is if we ever release a 2.1 to backport what makes sense to a 1.10 if the oldIE's are still a big enough market share.

I'd also like to point out that this concern only comes into play 2 years from now. We are not intending to drop support for oldIE forever, but we do want to make jQuery smaller and as efficient as possible in the newer browsers, and leaving all the oldIE code in as we progress past these browsers wastes time.

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

#232

Post by gnarf »

calvin wrote: post #210
wycats wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can think of a lot of reasons this approach won't work well for most of the sites I work on (other than a few blogs). 1) Combining jQuery with other JavaScript at build time (to reduce HTTP requests). At built-time, we don't know which browser they're using. We'll end up with two assets (the combined version w/ jQuery 1.9 and the combined version w/ jQuery 2.0). 2) Testing costs. For larger sites it's not a trivial…

It will be very difficult to develop a plugin for 2.0 that won't work on 1.9 - they will be 100% API compatible, and pass the same set of unit tests.

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

#233

Post by gnarf »

sabat wrote: post #190
51Cards wrote: 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…

This flat-out does not make sense. We all may hate IE6, 7, and 8, but a vast number of people still use it, and leaving them out just means alienating an audience and customers. Why do it? Spite?

Because removing all of the special case code paths in jQuery 2.0 will inevitably remove bytes from the library, allow us to use newer browser features with less polyfills, and increase performance for modern browsers. Read the post, we are not "dropping support" - 1.9 is going to be API compatible with 2.0.

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

#234

Post by gnarf »

seldo wrote: post #10
jorgem wrote: 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.

It does seem a strange decision. They even address it in their post: "jQuery was conceived specifically to address the differences in browsers, so we’re not going to abandon the essence of our philosophy and simply disregard the millions [still using] oldIE. Yet we also want to move ahead and take advantage of modern browsers, especially the growing mobile market." The whole point of jQuery is that it's supposed to a…

I'm sorry if we imply a feature freeze by bumping to 2.0... I'm not where you got that. The plan is to backport any API changes to 1.9 or even 1.10 if we need to make one in 2014.

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

#235

Post by nobleach »

gilini wrote: post #92
gnaritas wrote: post #85

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.

For CSS, perhaps you're right. For Javascript, it may only take an extra hour or so to monkeypatch their JS implementations for things like Array.indexOf().

Now many of the things I do involve Canvas and SVG for information display. Try a map of the United States with a few layers of SVG with a few thousand datapoints. It simply won't happen on IE Saying "it's not that hard" means you haven't tried anything more than CSS2 box model stuff.

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

#236

Post by saurik »

yuhong wrote: post #124
saurik wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery was never good at this. When I first used it on a project they had already drooped support for Safari 1.x, despite that being available version of Safari available for Mac OS X 10.4. I was, at the time, living with my girlfriend and a friend of hers, both of whom used 10.4 and Safari 1.x: it was honestly quite common among people who couldn't quite afford new computers. Regardless, when we sent the demo of our…

10.4 shipped with Safari 2.x and could be upgraded up to 4.x. You mean 10.3?

I'll happily accept that (it was a while ago).

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

#237

Post by saurik »

masklinn wrote: post #136
saurik wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery was never good at this. When I first used it on a project they had already drooped support for Safari 1.x, despite that being available version of Safari available for Mac OS X 10.4. I was, at the time, living with my girlfriend and a friend of hers, both of whom used 10.4 and Safari 1.x: it was honestly quite common among people who couldn't quite afford new computers. Regardless, when we sent the demo of our…

> When I first used it on a project they had already drooped support for Safari 1.x Which was a perfectly sensible decision from a developer POV considering how bad Safari's JS and DOM support was until 3.x > despite that being available version of Safari available for Mac OS X 10.4. 10.4 was released with Safari 2.0 and got updates up to 4.1.3. Are you talking about 10.3?

I simply cannot agree with you on this one; in my book, it is not in any way a perfectly sensible decision to make a browser that a ton of people were still using entirely crash when webpages using the library were opened.

The project I was working on was the kind of thing that probably had just a couple hundred people (if that, maybe even less) visit it during our testing period, and I got multiple reports of that crash.

If you want to popup a dialog box on these devices that says "I'm sorry, you are not supported" that's fine, but if it isn't even being on a browser like that, then no: it becomes entirely correct to point out that it was never actually good at handling cross-browser compatibility issues.

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