“As promised, this version leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers. In return it is smaller, faster, and can be used in JavaScript environments where the code needed for old-IE compatibility often causes problems of its own. But don’t worry, the jQuery team still supports the 1.x branch which does run on IE 6/7/8. You can (and should) continue to use jQuery 1.9 (and the upcoming 1.10) on web sites that need to accommodate older browsers.”
JQuery is such a wonderful tool!
SO glad IE support (prior to 9.0) has been dropped!
The size (minified) dropped from 91KB to 82KB by simply removing support for the terrible nightmare that is Internet Explorer – how telling!
I just dropped into one of my pre-production webapps to replace 1.9 and haven’t found any faults (in Chrome or Firefox), so I’m quite pleased!
–The loon
A whole 11Kb/s whoopie do!</sarcasm>
The main thing was faster performance of the library rather than size of it.
Older IE will still be supported by the 1.9 series and we should be able to use a conditional tag.
BTW there was actually more shims used in jQuery 2.0 for browsers that weren’t IE … they had to work around more bugs in browsers that weren’t IE.
Microsoft’s IE team are actually working pretty hard to release faster and to the right W3C spec. Whether you believe it is because they have to or want to … it benefits every web dev.
Edited 2013-04-19 20:20 UTC
I don’t think these 11kb (zipped) code are comments. This is code that does not have to be executed or maintained. So it is certainly progress. No need for sarcasm.
Edited 2013-04-20 17:00 UTC
Yes it is legacy IE code. But the file size isn’t the big thing. It is the as you say the speed and maintainability of the code.
To drop IE 6 and 7 is good, to drop IE8 is stupid.
Edited 2013-04-19 02:49 UTC
That’s why they are continuing development on the 1.x branch as well. 2.0 requires a newish browser while 1.x will continue support and as IE8 usage dies so will usage of the 1.x branch.
Yeah, I think they’ve handled this pretty well. IE9 marks the point where it can be considered “good enough” to not need a lot of the previous special case handling.
Yes, IE8 is still used – some of my customers are only now upgrading to it as part of the migration away from XP – but for them, jQuery 1 is still there and maintained. And for the customers that *are* willing to run with IE9 as a minimum, we can get a little more efficiency by using jQuery 2.
I agree. IE8 is as high as you can go with Windows XP, and there are still a lot of installations out there.
Right, except you can still use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc…
For some, that is not the solution.
But not on some corporate intranets. And the usual response to this is, ‘well, if they coded to standards …’ But remember that a lot of these sites were developed in the mid-to-late 90’s, so they’re now 10-15 years old. It’s the same reason why a lot of businesses are still run on apps that were written in VB6. If it ain’t broke …
Back then, if you needed, for example, a treeview control with a popup menu on your website, there just weren’t a whole lot of other options than to use ActiveX. Ajax didn’t become a thing until years later. In the case where I work, they’ve done a lot of work to remove the IE-dependencies, but there’s probably 10-20% left that still require IE. Some of us have tried using ‘IE Tab’-like extensions, but that’s still a bit of a PITA in some spots and doesn’t really work all that well.
How should I put it? Oh yeah: fuck ’em.
Really. If your IT department is so out of touch with reality and current technologies that they won’t allow a modern browser alongside their stone-age IE then fuck ’em.
LOL, they allow modern browsers, but some stuff on the intranet (that we use daily) still only works with IE, so we HAVE to use IE. ‘So, why don’t they fix it then?’ They have fixed most of it. Don’t know what they’re waiting for to fix the rest
I assume it would be quite costly, or they would have done it by now.
I always find this funny.
It about corporate intranets. A lot of stuff (and I unfortunately contributed to it at the time) is IE specific.
TBH I don’t see how a lot of this is affects jQuery.
* A lot of these sites existed before Prototype Framework (which was the inspiration for jQuery).
* Open source stuff is largely frowned upon.
* Tools like browsium (Multiple IEs for basically Windows Vista and above in a corp environment) exist.
* I think people should be able to use any browser as long as it suites them. I don’t use IE … I know a lot of people that do who aren’t techy and who am I to force them to use another browser?
Edited 2013-04-19 20:16 UTC
TBH I think they will be keeping backward compatibility, so supporting older IE will be simply using a conditional tag.