jQuery 2.0 Will Drop Support For IE 6, 7, 8

benfrog writes "The developers of jQuery recently announced in a blog entry that jQuery 2.0 will drop support for legacy versions of Internet Explorer. The release will come in parallel with version 1.9, however, which will include support for older versions of IE. The versions will offer full API compatibility, but 2.0 will 'benefit from a faster implementation that doesn't have to rely on legacy compatibility hacks.'"

Comments

Re:Like

[Kate6]

You see the bit where it says "full API compatibility"? That means with a few lines of PHP (or some equivalent back-end language) you can have a look at the user's browser USERAGENT string, figure out if it's an MSIE browser or not and serve the preferable version of jQuery... 1.9 for legacy IE, 2.0 for IE9 and for standards compliant browsers. And the "full API compatibility" means the rest of your code will play nice with either.

Re:IE Version Code Breakdown?

[tobiasly]

Does anyone here have enough knowledge of the JQuery codebase to say how the IE-specific cruft breaks down by version?

IE6 is a monstrosity; that's pretty much a given, and IE7 isn't great either. I could see dropping support for both of those being a big win in terms of cleaning up the codebase. That said, how much do they gain by dropping IE8 as well? It was only released 3 years ago.

The "promoted reader comment" in the linked Ars article actually answers exactly that:

Drizzt321 wrote:
Wow, removing support for IE8? That's a really bold move. I can see IE6 & 7, those are rather old and should be deprecated and people should be really encouraged to move to newer versions.

John Resig has said in interviews that most of the IE6 and IE7 code is needed for IE8 as well. While IE8 has far better layout and CSS engine evidently it still has pretty bad DOM API. Resig pointed out that dropping support for IE6 and IE7 would have very little impact on the size and complexity of the library unless they drop IE8 as well