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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
<!--[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.