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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.
Now they need the guts to stop supporting JavaScript.
So? You made the decision to use Microsoft technologies. Full stop.
That's like whining about gas mileage standards when you own a Hummer. The rest of the world shouldn't bow to your special snowflake existence.
Sorry that's harsh...but it's also how reality works.
Captcha: incensed
Now, if Flash would finally go away...
No, it really IS useless.
If you only target modern browsers, between querySelectorAll, XHR2 or fetch (ok, that will need polyfilling), and all the newer stuff that's available in 95% of browsers, jquery is very nearly useless.
The only reason to use it is to deal with older browser quirks. Once you don't need to support that, you don't need jquery.
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.
At work we have Chrome everywhere now. Reason being is IE 8 in the past year has stopped working for a large number of websites!
Shit even ADP credit card processing for customers or to print out our paystubs just stopped working.
IE 8 users see the writing on the wall for the past year now and won't blame you if everyone else including IE's own default MSN page doesn't support it!
http://saveie6.com/
Use IE8 exploit the kickoff to upgrade to Windows 10. Which won't include IE8.
Why write malware when you can use someone else's?
<!--[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.
CSS selectors are MUCH easier than using document.getElementsByTagName, document.getElementsByClassName, document.getElementById. Those are all a mouthful when I can just type $(".className") and be done with it and have terser code that is easier to read (if you know jQuery).
jQuery's chaining also makes it a lot easier and nicer looking to manipulate DOM elements, unless you really hate chaining I guess. var x = document.createElement("input"); x.type = "checkbox"; x.checked = false; x.click = //etc; OR $("").prop({"type": "checkbox", "checked": false}).click(//etc);. If you're doing a lot of manipulation and .append()s it's a lot nicer looking.
jQuery also handles multiple elements in a selector. $(".red").removeClass("red"); is a lot more terse and easier to understand than a for loop over a set of elements from document.getElementsByClassName. And of course if your selector is more complex that just makes it easier to understand than the vanilla equivalent.
The ability to handle quirks was a big reason to use jQuery, and I think there are still some things in modern browsers it will smooth over, so it continues to be a good reason in and of itself.
Just be sure not to use any functionality that's not in the jQuery 1 version that you use, but that should be easy.
Someone should put together some sort of high level library to make this seamless and cover the edge cases for compatibility. It could even include some fancy wrappers for common stuff. JQScript?
I don't really need to. I already work on a lot of large scale web apps and sites targeting IE10 and up without using jQuery, and they work fine... ::shrugs::
Dude this 2016. Not 2006. Corporate sites no longer support IE 8 starting last year. Shit ADP processing is one huge corporate site for credit cards. Myaline won't even support IE 8.
Today corporations use Firefox and Chrome and MBA and PHB see sites like MSN miss render. They won't blame web developers.
In 2006 everyone used IE 6 and Firefox was a secret geek thing. It had 0 presence on corporation desktops! All the sites the PHB worked fine in IE 6. So it must be an incompetent web developer then etc. Those days are done.
Ditch IE 8. Corporations all have IE for that ancient SAP app and Firefox for everything else in 2016
http://saveie6.com/
I encourage you to check out the source to either JQuery or Sizzle. You'd be surprised how many workarounds are needed even for items like querySelectorAll and xhr2.
I encourage you to check out You Might Not Need jQuery. You'd be surprised how many workarounds aren't needed. This is especially true if you set the slider to exclude IE versions that have known unpatched security vulnerabilities (that is, everything before IE 9).
The people who block execution of JavaScript as an intrusion on the privacy and security of their computers will block execution of WebAssembly for the same reason.