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

http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core-version-1-9-and-beyond/

by wycats • 14 years ago

430 228 14 years ago

blog.jquery.com

drags• 14 years ago

I think this makes a lot of sense.

One of our products is a B2B analytics tool that leverages a custom Chrome extension for one piece of functionality. As a result, all of our users are on Chrome.

We already use chai for testing, which doesn't really work in older IE versions, and it'll be great to get the performance improvement from this change as well.

wildster• 14 years ago

I won't be using for a few a years but I am glad it is leading pushing people to CSS3 compliance.

redslazer• 14 years ago

huh?

zaptheimpaler• 14 years ago

IE 7 and 8 are still a huge chunk of the market, and they dont support CSS3.

mlreed328• 14 years ago

wat?

jorgem2• 14 years ago

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.

mpd4• 14 years ago

Did you read the article? 1.9 will keep oldIE support, get minor updates, and be API-compatible with 2.0.

mythz• 14 years ago

Fuck IE - they've done the same to us for years.

elithrar• 14 years ago

> Fuck IE - they've done the same to us for years.

You're not "fucking IE" though, you're fucking the end-users; many of whom might be stuck on XP (and therefore IE8) without a huge choice. Corporate users, education users, those without the money to upgrade their OS/machine, etc.

JoeCortopassi• 14 years ago

Not sure if you read the article, but 1.9 and 2.0 will basically be the same, just different underlying code. 1.9 will support IE<9, and 2.0 will be smaller/faster/more stable

jorgem2• 14 years ago

Ok. So, if I upgrade and someone does visit from an older IE browser what happens? :) I'll be back to testing browser differences.

I guess those are pretty old browsers, so oh well.

seldo2• 14 years ago

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 allow you to move ahead without losing backwards compatibility. Making this split -- especially with a version number, which implies a feature-freeze for 1.9 and new stuff only in 2.0 -- seems like they're just admitting defeat on their primary function.

ams6110• 14 years ago

I think they just realized they can continue to support the old IE versions while other JS libraries advance in functionality, or they can stay competitive.

gnarf4• 14 years ago

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.

zanny2• 14 years ago

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 heads it is not ok to expect employees to be accessing the internet through IE. Businesses don't have the rights to stick their fingers in their ears singing 'lalala' while the internet attempts to grow around the tumour of conditional comments and other crap.

barryfandango2• 14 years ago

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 some of our larger and less nimble customers to get stuck on an older version until they can fix their browser situation.

hrabago• 14 years ago

> 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.

bztzt• 14 years ago

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.

nakedgremlin• 14 years ago

I love this product roadmap write up!

Explanations littered with reasoning and also a code-level solution for something that won't be an issue until one year down the road. Hopefully that 93KB (un-Gzipped) beast can be knocked down a bit with 2.X.

sampl• 14 years ago

Zepto is already a popular option for those who want jQuery features in a lightweight library. The API is essentially identical to jQuery, making it a drop-in replacement at a fraction of the size.

zeptojs.com

wycats4• 14 years ago

Zepto is not drop in. Not even close.

davidlumley2• 14 years ago

Could you expand on that at all? I realise that Zepto covers a (very) small subset of jQuery functions, but I thought that in a lot of use cases it would be an appropriate substitute?

dspillett2• 14 years ago

That doesn't list IE as a supported platform at all (not even the current IE9), so while you should be OK (if IE is now as close to compliant as MS claim it should just work) if you find problems in IE you might be on your own when it comes to researching and fixing them.

See http://zeptojs.com/#platforms - specifically "we may add support for Internet Explorer 10 ... depending ..." and the lack of any mention of IE before 10.

juddlyon• 14 years ago

Kudos to the jQuery team for taking a risk.

zalew• 14 years ago

it's not their risk, it's ours.

davidlumley2• 14 years ago

Is it? There are other JavaScript libraries available, and 1.9 will still support IE.

bentlegen• 14 years ago

It isn't your risk. You can continue to use jQuery 1.x.

tambourine_man7• 14 years ago

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.

7D8• 14 years ago

"jQuery's main raison d'être might have gone out the window." - my thoughts, exactly!

wycats4• 14 years ago

The premise is that jQuery 1.9 and 2.0 are API-compatible, so you can do something like:

    <!--[if lt IE 9]>
        <script src="jquery-1.9.0.js"></script>
    <![endif]-->
    <!--[if gte IE 9]><!-->
        <script src="jquery-2.0.0.js"><</script>
    <!--<![endif]-->

New browsers will get a lighter download and a faster runtime. oldIE will still work with all the hacks required to make it work.

mkmcdonald3• 14 years ago

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

tambourine_man7• 14 years ago

We deal with enough conditionals already. Besides, sharing the same API won't stop you from bumping into some bug that's present in one version and not the other.

We'll have to deal with two codebases.

Download and runtime speed are not a problem on the Desktop.

They should have had the guts to admit that this is all about mobile. Their denial at the end of the post is symptomatic.

acavailhez• 14 years ago

Elegant solution, but it's not possible if you bundle/minify all your scripts in one giant file, as more and more do.

calvin• 14 years ago

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 thing to test and support two different versions of jQuery. For any site that still needs to support IE8 (and 7 and 6), it will not be feasible to test and support two different versions of jQuery. As such, we'll never get the benefits of using jQuery 2.0 and would not be able to do so for many years.

3) Plugins will be written that only work for one of the two versions (1.9 or 2.0). This will divide the plugin ecosystem. Ideally, plugins should work for both, but many people will only test and support their plugins on one of the versions.

abuggia• 14 years ago

I'm not sure I see the issue here. If someone convinced me that jQuery 2.1+ will get great new features (not available for those forced to use 1.9) then maybe I'd feel differently. What's more likely is that innovation on 2.+ versions will be specific to modern browser features not supported by IE <= 8 anyway. If feature envy hit critical mass, I'm sure there'll be a new OSS project to port these features anyway. Also, months/years from now when Chrome 30 is released (for example), these 1.9ers will still have a library that supports both Chrome 30 and IE6! Maybe jQuery is a lib that has hit its API and performance limits for IE <= 8.

ahoge5• 14 years ago

>[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);});

     $('p').each(function () {console.log(this);});

MatthewPhillips3• 14 years ago

Agreed, [].slice.call is show-offy and pointless. Array.prototype.slice.call is the way to go.

I hope you realize that by saving yourself a few characters you've sacrificed an unknown amount of performance from your site. For such a simple query I'd use getElementsByTagName instead.

salmanapk2• 14 years ago

Good point.

BTW that could be written like this:-

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

leaverou• 14 years ago

Um, when did we forget how to write our own abstractions? It’s not black and white, either jQuery or vanilla JS with no helpers.

barryfandango2• 14 years ago

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.

alttab9• 14 years ago

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

anthonyb5• 14 years ago

> IE7 is a bit too soon, but IE8?... It was released in 2009!

That's old!

When JQuery 1.9 is released in 2013 it'll be four years old. Windows XP is eleven years old and will be end of lifed in early 2014. At what point will you pull the pin?

I think this is a good roadmap for phasing out Old IE support. It's not like they're yanking the rug out from under you - 1.9.x will be around for a while yet.

eli5• 14 years ago

You realize IE8 is the default browser that shipped with Windows 7, right?

benatkin2• 14 years ago

It makes more sense to use the dates they were superseded, than to use the dates when they came out. Most new computers were still shipping Windows XP until Windows Vista came out in 2007. That's just over five years ago.

dmethvin2• 14 years ago

What do you mean dropping IE8 support? The jQuery Core team still supports IE 6, 7, and 8, and has not announced that they are dropping it. That's what jQuery 1.9 is about.

harshreality• 14 years ago

IE8... released in 2009

Microsoft is the only major browser vendor to believe that a 3-year-old browser is acceptable on a supported OS (XP). Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera support XP with their latest browsers.

I agree it's too soon to drop support for IE8, but I'd love to see more pressure put on MS for leaving XP+IE users stuck with a second rate browser.

yuhong4• 14 years ago

Yea, MS has in general never released new versions of IE for a version of Windows that entered extended support, and the extended support phase lasts for five years!

saurik3• 14 years ago

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 product for the local school district I was getting reports that the entire browser was crashing, which I traced down to some sketchy code in jQuery that had been tested so poorly on this version of Safari that no one noticed this highly fatal error.

When I reported the issue to a major jQuery contributor (a friend of mine), all I got was flak that people shouldn't be using that browser and should upgrade to 10.5... obviously I have never used jQuery in a project again.

yuhong4• 14 years ago

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

masklinn• 14 years ago

> 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?

kalininalex• 14 years ago

What have you been using instead?

alecr3• 14 years ago

How is this "dropping support" for old IE? They've said the 1.9 branch will still receive bug fixes for a while. I doubt they'll leave the 1.9 branch behind (in regards to new API features) until IE8 gets close to IE6's current market share.

OlivierLi• 14 years ago

Just FYI saying "main raison d'être" is redundant.

It's a little like saying "the main sole goal of your existence".

mkmcdonald3• 14 years ago

I'll play the cynic here and try to diagnose why this is even being considered.

jQuery is a very invasive API. Its goal is to steal all the work from the developer, and to "guarantee" what it deems to be "correct" input for a certain subset of browsers. This approach may ostensibly work, but inevitably falls apart, which leads to thousands of "bugs" being reported.

Because the API has grown to be so massive, goalposts "must" be moved in order to create a lighter API. Once again, this is because of a design flaw. Goalposts will continue to be moved in cyclical fashion unless an alternative design is used. Fellow developers may denigrate me for it, but I will explain how this problem can be avoided.

An API that tries to cater to everyone cannot and will not succeed. This is evidenced by the upcoming "fork". Conversely, an API that provides a set of tools to developers without catering can work in many environments. The burden is then placed upon the developer to choose which environments matter. As has been outlined by mobile developers, object inferences for IE 6 really are unnecessary for mobile Webkit environments. I have written here on this concept before, mostly on the topic of "graceful degradation". Browser specificity can and will kill a client-side API.

tianshuo• 14 years ago

jQuery is throwing its burden --- on developers and users. But since it is on 1/3 of websites, maybe it does have the power to influence a change.

secoif3• 14 years ago

I don't know what your definition of software success is if jquery doesn't fall in that category.

AgentConundrum• 14 years ago

So does this mean that there will be ongoing development in the 1.9 line which will add new features available in the 2.0 line, or is this just the end of the line for IE <= 8? The blog seems to imply the latter, and that 1.9.x is only going to be used for bug/security updates, without new functionality.

If that's true, this seems like an odd line in the sand for them to draw. IE9 isn't available before Win7, so it can't die until users upgrade their OS.

According to StatCounter[1], IE8 still represents 13.78% of Worldwide visits (plus 1.4% for IE7; IE6 is just part of 'other' now), and 14.92% of North America (IE7; 1.79%).

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201206...

estel2• 14 years ago

IE9 is available for Vista too. It's not available more crucially for XP, but XP is EOL in April 2014, which is within the timeframe for 1.9.x and 2.x to remain API compatible.

slexaxton• 14 years ago

You don't have to go from IE8 to IE9. You can go from IE8 to _any other browser_, and things will look up.

baq• 14 years ago

Tell that to corporate IT.

51Cards3• 14 years ago

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 will get and XP is going to be out there for a long time yet (sadly), especially in corporate environments. Effectively (as far as IE only environments are concerned) JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS.

wycats4• 14 years ago

The cycle here is pretty long:

jQuery 2.0 will be released in "Early 2013". For some time (probably at least 6 months if not longer), jQuery 1.9 and 2.x will be perfectly API compatible. That means that the conditional comment approach will work with very little downside.

That gets us to summer or Fall 2013. At this point, there may be a release of jQuery 2.1. According to the blog post, it will probably contain few new features, and some speed improvements. It will almost certainly not break backwards API compatibility. At this point, you can upgrade to jQuery 2.1 for the speed improvements and simply not use the new features. The conditional comment approach will still work.

That gets us to Spring 2014. At this point, Microsoft will EOL Windows XP. It's frankly hard for me to imagine more than a tiny number of Windows XP users using IE8 at this point. There was a lot of similar-sounding concern about IE6, which has mercifully vanished. IE8 was at 30% last November; it is now down to 15%.

Even at this point, a jQuery 2.2 will likely not break API backwards compatibility. If IE8 clingers are more stubborn than we expect, we can always modify the strategy to be more aggressive about strict compatibility between the branches.

Unfortunately, many of us are still fighting the last war, where the cutting edge (IE6->IE7) was plodding and the slow upgrading tail was huge. It's time that we acknowledged that the ecosystem has changed: the slow upgrading tail grows smaller all the time, as the cutting edge absorbs more of the mindless browser population. At the same time, the pace of the cutting edge grows faster and faster. We aren't quite there yet, but we should prepare for a future that is not a simple clone of the 2004-2008 era of browser development.

tambourine_man7• 14 years ago

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.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

>JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS.

doesnt chrome work on xp?

ahoge5• 14 years ago

Every browser vendor still supports Windows XP. The only exception is Microsoft. IE9 only works on Vista and Win7. IE10 will only work on Win7 and Win8.

rmc• 14 years ago

Firefox aswell

melling• 14 years ago

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 test in Firefox too.

jakejake• 14 years ago

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.

Ecio78• 14 years ago

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).

dmethvin2• 14 years ago

> 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.

51Cards3• 14 years ago

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.

yxhuvud• 14 years ago

Don't be silly. There are alternative browsers. XP will not lack proper web access.

Yes, I realize corporate settings can be inflexible enough that it won't happen in some corporations, but isn't it a good thing that corporate IT get more pressure to accomodate?

sabat2• 14 years ago

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?

gnarf4• 14 years ago

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.

nnash• 14 years ago

I agree, I can understand IE6 since not even ms supports it anymore but 7 and 8? Seems a bit drastic to me.

ericb• 14 years ago

So if the market share report links below are in the ballpark, that is about 60% of IE's current 49% market share, or about 29% of all current browsers. This makes jquery 2 a non-starter. Even using 1.9 is suspect because the questionable decision making process here makes me think I will have more headaches in the future if I stick with jQuery.

IE Market Share: http://bit.ly/LUhxlA

IE Version Market Share: http://bit.ly/LUh9n2

chris_wot8• 14 years ago

Interesting way of looking at it. Except that is about 70% of browsers that will work with jquery 2.0. Puts it into perspective!

nfriedly• 14 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of hate here, but I think this is a good decision. I know what a pain it is to support older versions of IE because I was doing it before jQuery came onto the scene. They took a lot of that pain from us and hoisted it onto themselves, but we can't expect them to carry that burden forever.

My company dropped IE 7 support months ago, I look forward to the day we can drop IE 8. We'll probably be suck with jQuery 1.9 for a while, but my side projects will start using 2.0 right away.

codgercoder• 14 years ago

Hard to tell whether this will be good or bad; it does bring to mind some of the gyrations commercial software vendors have forced, from time to time.

elclanrs• 14 years ago

I think this is a good move from jQuery. Other popular software/services should do it too, and it'll be THE END of awful IE versions.

I still do support IE8 but it is a pain in the ass to have to work around stupid bugs...pseudo elements are not well supported, font rendering is subpar, no css3 support, sloooow JavaScript engine...and I could go on for ever.

dinkumthinkum2• 14 years ago

To all the people upset about IE8 being the last browser supported on XP ... Isn't that Microsoft's problem rather than JQuery's? Apparently, Microsoft is not interested in providing a modern Web experience to their users.

I don't really see the problem anyway. JQuery can move forward, and those that want to support IE8 have JQuery 1.9 and I'm sure there will be a cottage industry of people maintaining updates to support IE8 for the next 20 or 30 years. In the meantime, the rest of the world will be able to move on. Perhaps people could even use UserAgents to provide legacy experiences for the IE8 crowd ... multiple views ... what a concept.

slig• 14 years ago

But it's not the last. Chrome, FF and Opera works. I can't understand all the whining here. Corporate world can run IE for it's shitty apps and a modern browser for whatever else. Also, that's their problem, not mine, jQuery's or the majority of people that have to download a bloated codebase to support a 3 year old, no standards browser.

Uchikoma3• 14 years ago

For all the "just upgrade" comments:

Internal IT departments have no, no, no incentive to upgrade browsers. "Surfing the internet" is not a reason for IT departments to upgrade.

dougbarrett• 14 years ago

Yup, a lot of web apps are using ancient versions of JS libraries, aren't compatible cross browser, and updates are few and far between. The issue is with enterprise apps, you really need to have a solid release schedule/plan. If you update an app and say "You are now forced to use a new browser to get the functionality of this." you will piss off a lot of people.

It's much easier for the app developer to create poorly written hacks for the older js libraries, because they are less likely to force a browser requirement change.

For enterprise apps, 1.9 is going to be around for an extremely long time.

Uchikoma3• 14 years ago

It's not for enterprise apps.

If your startup is C2C, everything is fine, if your B2C or B2B your in trouble. If your B2X then you even do not have the leverage of a contract etc.

mpd4• 14 years ago

Then they will be left in the past. It's unreasonable to expect me to hold my own product back because of lazy corp IT depts.

Unless they are contributing more revenue than it takes to support them, screw them. For me at least, this is not remotely the case and I'm happy to leave them in the dust.

Uchikoma3• 14 years ago

You will not only be stuck with 1.9, but every other library you use that is based on jQuery - and most in my stack are - can't be upgraded as I assume those libraries will not play conservative but switch to 2.0 (and 2.1 next)

grabastic• 14 years ago

1.9 and 2.0 have the same api

wildtype• 14 years ago

So i have to stick with jquery 1.9. People that ask me to create web page are IE user. Here, those who use firefox, opera, or safari can create their own web by themself.

benatkin2• 14 years ago

This is worst of both worlds. Compared to naming branches, they both encourage sites to unnecessarily break compatibility, and are held back from developing new features.

They should give 1.9, 2.0, and 2.1 names, and make 2.0 mainline, and call 1.9 "compat" or something and encourage the conditional comments. Then, soon, they should start working on 2.1, which isn't API compatible with a version that's compatible with IE 6/7/8. The current plans for 2.1 are an awfully long time to wait for features that aren't available with IE 6/7/8, for apps and sites that need such things (and have a target audience that is ready for it).

gouranga5• 14 years ago

This is a retarded decision which I do not support.

IE6 fine, IE7 fine but not IE8. IE8 is required for most corporate environments where they haven't killed of Windows XP yet. That is a surprisingly large amount of people.

If this happens, we'll fork jQuery 1.9 and support it separately.

sanswork4• 14 years ago

2 will come out in 2013 just a bit before Microsoft officially removes all support for XP. If your IT department hasn't made moves to upgrade everyone from XP by this point you have bigger issues to deal with than jQuery availability.

gouranga5• 14 years ago

Forced obsolescence doesn't mean people aren't still using it and it doesn't mean that because Microsoft stop patching that it's still vulnerable. Using it after April 2014 is not a problem.

The NHS in the UK has over 1 million Windows XP deployments out there still on NHSnet which is a nationwide secure private WAN. A lot of software vendors have to support that.

Your view is popular but naive.

dave1010uk• 14 years ago

I wonder if the code would be a bit cleaner if they dropped IE9 and year-old Firefox / Chrome / Safari support too. That would allow them to use new stuff like XMLHttpRequest 2, ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode, Typed Arrays, requestAnimationFrame and CSS transitions / animations.

rads• 14 years ago

All this talk about IE usage numbers led me to a website Microsoft made to say goodbye to IE6: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

The site reports that in the US, IE6 has 0.6% market share — relatively nothing. But look over at China: 22.4% of its 500 million Internet users still browse with IE6. Moving forward benefits the Internet as a whole, but the Chinese market is one instance where backward compatibility is important.

formatjam• 14 years ago

I grew up in China and this is def true. IE6 is still popular in China is because a lot of banks and governments website only works in IE(6). Since banks are state owned, they don't have incentive to compete to make their site better. I think the only hope is to wait till their computers die and when they install new windows IE6 will be gone.

jetz• 14 years ago

Jquery does what most open source projects do not. That is providing a clear roadmap with 99% questions answered.

nilliams• 14 years ago

I think there's a key point that hasn't been mentioned yet, that there may just be no need to deliver JavaScript to IE 6-8 at all. A lot of smart devs are already taking a similar approach with CSS, serving up a minimal 'print' stylesheet for oldIE [1] [2].

- If you're using JS for progressive enhancement on an otherwise static site, e.g. form validation, pjax, image carousels, tabs, animations... simply drop that JS for 6-8. Form validation should just round-trip to the server as it has to do anyway, pages should just link normally, other visual enhancements can be dropped. That's the progressive enhancement way after all.

- If you're trying to build a single-page web app for IE 6-8 and this is your reason for wanting jQuery to work, then you're going to find those browsers have JS engines that are incredibly slow and a JS-heavy web app for oldIE is not going to deliver a good user experience even if you get it to 'work'. I think frankly this is an unrealistic goal from the get-go. The pitiful speed of JS on these browsers is something that does seem to be often overlooked.

If you absolutely have to push a single-page web app to a corporate customer stuck on oldIE, Chrome Frame is a very sensible option. This has served us well and we've yet to encounter a customer who complains, as long as you give them plenty of forewarning and explanation. It can be tied down to only trigger on your site, so sysadmins really have nothing to gripe about with respect to FUD about attack vectors etc.

Anyway I'm not saying 'you definitely shouldn't be serving JS to oldIE' I'm just putting it out there as something to consider, as usual in this business there's no single answer.

[1] http://css-tricks.com/ (serves a print stylesheet for oldIE - possibly just IE6 I forget)

[2] http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/universal_inter...

sageikosa• 14 years ago

I was just thinking that it Netflix can be sued under ADA for not close-captioning material that didn't provide closed captioning, then someone is eventually going to sue someone for not providing access to a public website via the only browser they can use.

The real losers will probably be the public libraries that provide Internet access, but don't have the resources to afford equipment or manpower to upgrade machines and browsers.

andersnolsen• 14 years ago

There are so many reasons for using jQuery. Myself, I'm using it for a ton of reasons: speed up development, create more compact and readable code for myself and coworkers, enjoy the huge range of plugins, theming... you name it. Support for IE-ancient is not on my list. Actually I would love to see it gone, die, disappear, vanish.

Even though jQuery handles most of my cross-browser issues I still have to test and worry, create workarounds and lots of additional code, consider it in my architecture, take care in the design and handle it in the application lifecycle.

I have been looking for and at able framework that DON’T support old browsers. Thank you for not supporting IE-ancient in your 2.+ releases, I will continue using you jQuery!

s0me0ne• 14 years ago

Did anyone read the post? 1.9 will still support ie6/7/8, so just use that for compatibility. Let's move the web forward. I still use XP at home and don't care because I use Firefox. So if grandma/grandpa and corporate america don't get all the new bells and whistles, they are probably used to it, because they don't have rounded corners, text-shadow and box-shadow on everything anyway. They probably won't even know what they are missing on that HP/Dell POS. :p

Fizzadar• 14 years ago

Good stuff IMO; those who continue to insist on using IE<9 deserve a degraded experience. Those who are forced by their employers should lobby them to upgrade/move to FF/Chrome (and when they inevitably don't listen, then it's really too bad - but if said employer wants to use a service w/o old IE support it might force the upgrade).

In a world where technology is developing at such a pace, it really is time we stopped worrying about old, poorly built bits of software.

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

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