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.

IE6 and 7?

[Anonymous Coward]

Find, finally kill the bastards. But 8?! This is the last IE available for XP, which is still widely used in companys....

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

IE8 = "latest" version for many

[tverbeek]

I can see dropping IE6 & IE7, because there's no sound reason for anyone to still be using them. But IE8 is the terminal version of IE for Windows XP, which remains one of the most widely-used operating systems on the planet. It's not going to go away just because someone doesn't want to support it any more.

Re:IE8 = "latest" version for many

[dingen]

The problem is that IE8 handles Javascript in much the same non-standard way als IE6 & IE7. If a library such as jQuery includes support for IE8, it's supporting IE6 & IE7 as well.