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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.
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
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.