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JQuery 2.0 Released

blog.jquery.com

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Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#161

Post by dspillett »

Andrex wrote: post #57
gcr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What does "several" mean? Are we talking two years? Five? A decade? Until jQuery changes their minds?

How relevant will IE8 be in just two years, though? If it's 3-5 which is what it sounds like, then that's just more of a nail in the coffin for IE8 support.

> How relevant will IE8 be in just two years, though?

That very much depends on your target audience.

For home users IE8 is pretty much dead already, the only subset of people stuck there are the few who are using XP and have not switched to Firefox/Chrome/other. As more and more game-y things on the web start demanding newer features rather than creating/using/supporting fallback options for IE8 (canvas in particular).

In more corporate environments, IE8 is often still king and will be for several years. Most of the clients for the product I spend most of the working day panel beating are large banks and most of them have only just migrated to IE8 from IE6 because they have to soon (IE6 falls out of extended support in less than 12 months, along with XP+sp3). If they follow the same pattern (and I see little reason why they won't, slow moving mammoths that they are) I and many others will have to be concerned about IE8 until at least 2018 as IE8 falls out of extended support in 2020 (as it's support windows are tied to Windows 7's). Hopefully jQuery's idea of "several years" is as least as long as this.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#162

Post by coldtea »

silverbax88 wrote: post #125
coldtea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't drop them. This is for modern websites/services, not enterprise catering dinos.

I can do both. I'm not limited to only supporting small clients.

I don't Google caters to small clients either. Yet, it has dropped support for IE6.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#163

Post by coldtea »

EnderMB wrote: post #160
coldtea wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's an open source community project so the answer is obvious. 1.9 will be supported for as long as people care about to support it. Do those complaining want to somehow tell the developers what they should be working on? Where does the sense of entitlement come? Even if the whole core team insists on going 2.0 only at some point (high unlikely), it's not like it needs any highly technical skills for intereste…

> 1.9 will be supported for as long as people care about to support it. This is what worries me. You only need to spend an hour on HN or Reddit to see that web devs couldn't care less about legacy browsers, even when most businesses need to support them. I support the decision to fork jQuery, but I too am worried about whether the 1.x branch will continue to be supported, and also whether we'll see people releasing p…

>This is what worries me. You only need to spend an hour on HN or Reddit to see that web devs couldn't care less about legacy browsers, even when most businesses need to support them.

As I wrote, even if the whole core team insists on going 2.0 only at some point (high unlikely), it's not like it needs any highly technical skills for interested people to jump in and maintain 1.9.

>I support the decision to fork jQuery, but I too am worried about whether the 1.x branch will continue to be supported,

You worry too much. You can use 1.9. 1.8, 1.7, even 1.6 indefinitely. It's not like they would stop working on old browsers for some reason. I have websites that serve 2-3 jQuery versions behind, and they work just as well in any old and modern browser, including using several plugins (and a matching jQuery UI). So why do you even need to upgrade to 1.9 for the next 3-4 years?

Not to mention they also said they'll release 1.10.

Seriously, people, this is a non problem.

Want to continue supporting IE6?

1) Trust the jQuery team and use 10.9, and eventually, 1.10.

2) Continue using 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 etc indefinitely. They still work on the latest browsers, and of course they will work forever on the older ones.

3) Go in 10.9 and fix any incompatibility you find with the latest browsers yourself. Or wait for someone of the multi-million strong web dev community to do it for you.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#164

Post by dspillett »

angersock wrote: post #66
jeresig wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work on jQuery any more but I (and I know many others on the jQuery team) all build web sites as part of their day jobs (and, thus, need to continuing supporting IE 8). It's going to be a very long time before support for the 1.x branch is dropped. But hopefully soon, death of IE 8 willing.

Is there any list of companies that currently require old versions of IE? I know a lot of hospitals do, and people handwave banks and whatnot. If there was a big list of "These people still use old versions of IE", then we could: A. Properly shame/advertise for attack/avoid getting work from these people. B. Expose a dedicated market audience for compatibility-minded dev shops Either of these would seem to be a Good…

> and people handwave banks and whatnot

RBS. Aviva. NABG. And that is just the larger ones I have experience of. Those are pretty big hands to wave. If we say "sorry, our products might not work as well in IE8" they'll say "sorry, we can't use your products any more".

And it isn't just that they demand IE8 support in case their customers need it, their desktop builds used for all their internal uses have nothing but IE8. "Maybe they'll upgrade soon" we hope, "or perhaps given their users one of ff/chrome/other as an alternative along side IE8", but given they only upgraded to IE8 from IE6 over the last two years (the last of our clients to move from IE6 completed that transition about three months ago) I doubt I'll be seeing them use anything better internally for a good few years.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#165

Post by EnderMB »

coldtea wrote: post #163
EnderMB wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1.9 will be supported for as long as people care about to support it. This is what worries me. You only need to spend an hour on HN or Reddit to see that web devs couldn't care less about legacy browsers, even when most businesses need to support them. I support the decision to fork jQuery, but I too am worried about whether the 1.x branch will continue to be supported, and also whether we'll see people releasing p…

> This is what worries me. You only need to spend an hour on HN or Reddit to see that web devs couldn't care less about legacy browsers, even when most businesses need to support them. As I wrote, even if the whole core team insists on going 2.0 only at some point (high unlikely), it's not like it needs any highly technical skills for interested people to jump in and maintain 1.9. > I support the decision to fork jQu…

Don't get me wrong. I agree with you, and I don't think it's really a problem. Hell, if it is it's not a problem to use both libraries, and to serve 1.x to those using older browsers. It's just a shift in the core mentality of what people view jQuery as.

Many of us use jQuery because it works, regardless of what browser a user is on. For a lot of others, jQuery IS JavaScript. If they want to do something on their site, they look for a jQuery plugin and use that, otherwise in their mind it'll be too much work to get it done. It's depressing, but it's the reality of development.

One point you raise that I do disagree with is:

> Go in 10.9 and fix any incompatibility you find with the latest browsers yourself. Or wait for someone of the multi-million strong web dev community to do it for you.

This is the classic open-source "fuck you with a smile" response. Fixing new functionality is not an attractive problem, and out of the multi-million strong community I can see very few people with both the skills, the time, or the desire to fix these problems, and those that could fix the problems are more likely to wait for someone else to do it.

I'd consider myself fairly handy with JavaScript, but I'm also a very busy man, and my office won't want me spending company time fixing a bug in a plugin if there is another way. Also, there isn't a developer alive that likes fixing legacy bugs. I can think of a million things I'd rather do than fix IE6-7 bugs.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#166

Post by robryan »

beobab wrote: post #157
angersock wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a large number of companies whose web capabilities need to support people who use their website while working at the companies that have older versions of IE. Like who? Honest question. I know that not all users currently have modern browsers (which is total bullshit, by the way--with free, open-source browsers as well as Chrome and the like, there is no excuse for this) but this isn't something we should tre…

We have a large number of users in rural areas of Kenya who only have access to a very old computer which barely has enough steam to start up each day. They still use IE6.

Wouldn't they get a big performance boost on an old computer running something else?

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#167

Post by ward »

as_if wrote: post #9
apendleton wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the idea has pretty much always been that jQuery 1.9 and 2.0 would be feature-comparable, just with different sizes and supported browsers. See http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core-version-1-9-an...

They hate IE SO much, they even made the drop a new major release. This is what I call commitment.

But isn't that exactly the thing about major releases? That compatibility may be broken. See also http://semver.org/

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#168

Post by Silhouette »

angersock wrote: post #115
ericd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear that you don't know many people who use IE8. What you're saying sounds nice in theory, but falls down in practice. Many people lack the knowledge of better browsers, or are simply afraid of changing, because they've learned how to use IE, and they don't want to learn a whole new set of routines. They don't use computers in the way you do, because they don't understand the underlying principles - the…

There are macros in IE8? Really? Look, there are two camps: companies that refuse to run modern browsers, and individual users. I posit that we should list the members of the former camp, and that we should educate the members of the latter camp. Changing from IE to Firefox to Chrome shouldn't be a big deal, and if we've only managed to instill idiot monkey-level tools usage in our users we have (as developers and hu…

You keep banging on this drum as if you're going to somehow name and shame big businesses for making perfectly reasonable business decisions.

Please understand that a web browser is just a software tool like any other. You don't install a web browser at your business so you can say you use some bleeding edge shiny. You install a web browser to get some useful job done. Much of the time, that involves accessing in-house systems. Some of the time, maybe it involves accessing the external WWW, perhaps to research or buy something. Supporting the latest browsers so everyone can spend even longer playing on-line games or posting on Facebook is, shall we say, not a business priority.

Now, please understand that perhaps the single most important attribute for most large businesses with significant IT operations and mostly non-technical staff is predictability. If everyone is running on a stable software foundation, then tools can be built on top of that foundation. If everyone is running the same version of their end user software, then help desk staff can provide canned step-by-step guides to doing things, or remotely access someone's machine to fix a problem or guide a user through a new process for the first time. If every server in a group is running the same operating system distribution then you only have to keep track of one set of security patches and apply them uniformly. And so it goes on.

In this context, it is entirely reasonable that businesses "refuse to run modern browsers". Your modern browsers do stupid things like moving the goalposts every six weeks (or every few months if you jump through special hoops to use a laughably named long-term support version). Your modern browsers include new technologies that introduce security and privacy risks we didn't have before. Your modern browsers break backwards compatibility and won't run the $5,000,000 bespoke CRM package on our intranet any more! And in most cases, your modern browsers offer no business benefit compared to the tried and tested tools already in use.

In short, while you may wish that everyone ran the latest shiny new browser, there are very good reasons why many big businesses don't. If you think the guys running IT for those places somehow didn't notice that there are other options or just can't be bothered to upgrade or suffer from "intellectual sloth" then you really have no idea how things work at that level at all.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#169

Post by Perceptes »

davis_m wrote: post #76

I don't understand why the smaller file size is such a big deal. The file is going to be cached, and with the use of CDNs, is more than likely already cached before the client ever visits my website. So if the Query team is still going to support these browsers in 1.9, why even make the 2.0 version?

File size is not only a concern in terms of download time. There's also parse time, and the amount of extra memory used to consider.

Re: JQuery 2.0 Released

#170

Post by nasmorn »

nbouscal wrote: post #110
dave5104 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, of course not. I'm just trying to make the point that some companies may not be comfortable with whatever IE8 is at right now. I think you can substitute "IE8" for any browser, and "40%" for whatever that browser's current market share is. Coincidentally, I work in the multi-family housing industry, and one of the industry titans requires IE to use their product--which everyone uses--so we have ~82% IE share o…

That's a shitty situation to be in. Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to disrupt that industry titan, though.

Some businesses have deeper moats than front end dev speed.
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