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jQuery 3.0 Stops Supporting Internet Explorer Workarounds (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Thursday's release of jQuery 3.0 is "the first version that features absolutely no workarounds for old Internet Explorer browsers," reports Softpedia. "If customers are still asking you to work with IE6, IE7, and IE8, then you should stick with jQuery 1.0 for the foreseeable future." The jQuery blog explains that over 18 months of development, "We set out to create a slimmer, faster version of jQuery (with backwards compatibility in mind)... It is a continuation of the 2.x branch, but with a few breaking changes that we felt were long overdue." Besides jQuery's free, open source JavaScript library, they also released a "slim" version that excludes ajax and effects modules (as well as deprecated code), and a new version of the jQuery Migrate plugin.
Essentially, all jQuery has done is drop support for Internet Explorer on Windows XP and Vista. Fully updated, XP runs IE8 and Vista runs IE9. Google Chrome did the same thing 2 months ago when it started requiring Windows 7 and up. Windows XP support was dropped a long time ago. Vista is still supported, but only used by a small chunk of users worldwide (about 1.4%). While XP still has a larger worldwide userbase (around 10%), most companies and individuals don't consider them worth supporting or advertising/marketing/selling to.
jQuery does still support both IE10 and IE11, so it's not like they're dropping all IE workarounds as stated in the title.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Well, judging from any quick search of release notes for just about every service I look into, they are unlikely to be able to online bank, use Google services, use quite a lot of modern websites, Google and Bing will be whinging at them constantly, and most websites will look like shit or just not work at all.
Sure, it's nice to retain compatibility, but there's also a time to move on. Do you still push out Windows 3.1 apps? Do you test on Windows 95? Still using plugins from the 90's?
If you haven't noticed, without an HTML5 browser (all the plugins are dead now by the way - Java, ActiveX, etc. - only Flash really "works" at all and that's going) almost all the websites you visit are just broken.
So if you ask your users to move on to a modern browser, you won't be the first to ask them that, by a long shot, and that's warning enough itself.
As someone who works in education, where they never throw anything away if it can still be used in lessons, where I'm often asked to install CDs that have been lying around for 20 years or more (Shockwave anyone?), with teachers complaining they can't teach what they used to 20 years ago because they don't have that software (yeah, I know, don't go there), almost everything is now HTML5 - from both paid and free resources. Even the CDs have gone and everything's now web-based, even testing, assessment, etc. tools.
And this year, pretty much every supplier announced HTML5 versions because NOTHING ELSE works on an iPad - Flash, etc. Our banks enforce IE 10 minimum but recommend Firefox or Chrome.
These 15%? Yeah, they're not your main source of income if they haven't bought a PC or upgraded their browser in 10 years.
<!--[if lte IE8]> <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.4/jquery.min.js"></script> <![endif]-->
<!--[if !lte IE8]> <!--> <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.0.whatever/jquery.min.js"></script> <!-- <![endif]-->
If I typed that correctly then it should give users on IE8 and below jQuery 1, while everyone else gets jQuery 3 even if their browsers don't support conditional comments. Just be sure not to use any functionality that's not in the jQuery 1 version that you use, but that should be easy.