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.'"

Like

[Krojack]

I like this however I'm guessing anyone that starts using this will have a boat load of complains thus 2.0 won't be used for several years. Sadly. Damn IE slowing down even non-IE users!

So it's like Python 3

[tepples]

Developers tend not to write programs for Python 3 because most end users who have Python installed have Python 2 installed, and some Python environments (such as Windows) can't easily have multiple versions installed side-by-side. Likewise, developers will continue to use the jQuery 1.9 branch because until April 2014, when Windows XP reaches its end of life, a lot of people will still be using Internet Explorer 8.

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....

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.

This won't really affect anything.

[Kate6]

"Full API compatibility" means the same identical code should be able to work with the slower-performing version 1.9 on legacy IE browsers *and* with the more optimized version 2 on IE9 and standards compliant browsers.

All you need is some back-end code to examine the user's browser's "useragent" string and figure out which version of jQuery to serve.

<?php
preg_match( '/MSIE ([0-9\.]+)/', $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_USER_AGENT' ], $matches );
if ( ( count( $matches ) == 2 ) && ( floatval( $matches[ 1 ] ) < 9.0 ) )
     echo "<script type='text/javascript' src='jQuery-1.9.min.js'></script>";
else
     echo "<script type='text/javascript' src='jQuery-2.0.min.js'></script>";
?>

Re:Like

[madprof]

Holy moley. I might be saying what others say but please, for the love of everything good, use conditional comments.
They've been around since IE5. You will love them.

Re:IE8 = "latest" version for many

[multicoregeneral]

It's unreasonable to expect the entire industry to stand still because the granny contingent refuses to buy a new pc or tablet. Every other piece of the technology industry is about rapid change. Web development has brief periods of rapid change, and then we stand still for YEARS, waiting for everyone to catch up. It's a huge mistake, and it's holding up progress. The standard needs to be a reasonable four years of compatibility. No more, no less.

There are already issues with Jquery and IE 6 and 7. Take fore example, slideUp and slideDown functions will throw your content aimlessly across the screen (certainly in 6, not sure about 7). Show and hide don't work well either when you're dealing with timing events. 8 has always been my bear minimum standard for Jquery.

Here's the thing though: IE 8 will go away... if every website in the world stopped supporting it. How many millions of sites use Jquery-latest from google?

Re:Like

[omfgnosis]

If you look at a set of the available conditional comments in an editor with proper syntax highlighting, it'll become obvious immediately how they work: everything that is targeted at IE (or specific versions thereof) is technically inside an HTML comment and ignored by other browsers; IE parses these comments and, in the presence of conditional directives it determines (by version) whether to treat them as if outside an HTML comment. Everything that targets non-IE browsers is outside of a comment, but IE will treat it as a comment.

This is a comment, unless loaded in IE versions 8 and below:
<!--[if lte IE 8]><script src="/path/to/jquery19.js"><![endif]-->

This is a comment, unless loaded in IE versions 9 and above:
<!--[if gte IE 9]><script src="/path/to/jquery20.js"><![endif]-->

This is not a comment, unless loaded in IE:
<!--[if !IE]><!--><script src="/path/to/jquery20.js"><!-- <![endif]-->

Re:IE8 = "latest" version for many

[marcosdumay]

It's unreasonable to expect the entire industry to stand still because the granny contingent refuses to buy a new pc or tablet.

Those grannies are paying your salary (well, paying the typical web developer's salary, may not apply personaly to you), are you sure you want them to go away?

Re:Like

[Alex Zepeda]

Plenty of tards lead kick ass lives.