Isn't one of the reasons for jquery to "abstract away" the differences between browsers so I don't have to worry about it?
Dropping support for popular browsers doesn't seem to help me much.
Dropping support for popular browsers doesn't seem to help me much.
"jQuery was conceived specifically to address the differences in browsers, so we’re not going to abandon the essence of our philosophy and simply disregard the millions [still using] oldIE. Yet we also want to move ahead and take advantage of modern browsers, especially the growing mobile market."
The whole point of jQuery is that it's supposed to allow you to move ahead without losing backwards compatibility. Making this split -- especially with a version number, which implies a feature-freeze for 1.9 and new stuff only in 2.0 -- seems like they're just admitting defeat on their primary function.
There were several fairly well known libraries a couple of years ago, but as far as I can tell, jQuery won that battle decisively. It has almost 100% penetration in the projects I'm familiar with that use a general purpose JS library, and it seems to be the default for articles and blog posts I find on-line these days too.
Part of that success came from the ecosystem reaching critical mass. Many people know jQuery. Many plug-ins are available for jQuery. And the vast installed base usually means quick bug fixes even for recent browser compatibility problems.
If there is something out there that is better by a wide enough margin to justify giving up that established ecosystem, I'd love to hear about it. The ecosystem has plenty of imperfections, but I haven't come across anything yet that seems nearly comprehensive enough to displace the incumbent here.
To be worth shifting away from the jQuery ecosystem to something new, the latter needs a compelling advantage and it needs to not have any deal-breaking disadvantages. Nothing I've come across so far myself seems to meet both criteria.
David Mark's My Library[0] is the best DOM library available by a wide margin. It has supreme browser support, and it's "modular" with a custom builder. The code is so solid that many people have borrowed from it, including the jQuery project and myself.
I've also created a DOM library, but with a more limited feature set (it's only a few months old). See my submissions for details.
And the corporate clients could finally get through their heads it is not ok to expect employees to be accessing the internet through IE. Businesses don't have the rights to stick their fingers in their ears singing 'lalala' while the internet attempts to grow around the tumour of conditional comments and other crap.
Still you gotta catch up at some point. The product I work on is dropping IE8 in January, which will cause some of our larger and less nimble customers to get stuck on an older version until they can fix their browser situation.
So... don't upgrade IE, but give people the option of - you know - running another browser. The IT folks can even lock it down so no one can do anything useful with it, but they could give people firefox, chrome, safari or opera as another tool on their desktop.
Holding back an entire company's ability to do any modern browsing because you're still tied to one HR intranet app from 2003 is just silly. There's no sane argument to be made for it, in light of the short- and long-term opportunity costs it imposes.
0. Rename IE to 'intranet'. 1. Configure IE to only access Intranet. 2. Switch everyone to chrome/firefox, keep bookmarks, etc 3. Hire some university students to temp man the support line as you are flooded with support requests.
As I said a nasty situation. Perhaps it would be best to spread a rumour that someone was fired thanks to IE. That way you are not evil IT getting in the way of everyone's job.
...or their company doesn't have the budget to upgrade their entire department to Windows 7.
I guess those are pretty old browsers, so oh well.
<!--[if lt IE 9]><script src="jquery-1.9.0.js"></script><![endif]-->
You're not "fucking IE" though, you're fucking the end-users; many of whom might be stuck on XP (and therefore IE8) without a huge choice. Corporate users, education users, those without the money to upgrade their OS/machine, etc.
Awareness: when sites don't work, they'll be aware of the problems. The truth is, most users at getting more educated about browsers all the time. It can't e helped that Microsoft has tied browser innovation and standardisation to their operating system.
Familiarity: really fairly bogus as an argument. There is really not that much different between the interfaces of Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox these days!
The less usable the net is for older browsers, the closer we move the users of those browsers to the threshold of upgrading.
It may mean more complaints from the staff to the IT department, it may mean grandma asking her grandkids why the google is broken, but if enough people are vocal about it, it will encourage upgrading.
Every time you support IE, you are slowing the uptake of newer browsers, and you are a bad person for it.
Being stuck on XP does not mean that you have to use IE8. You can still use the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or even Safari.
You can either stick with JQuery 1.9 for as long as you want to support IE8 (hopefully not more than 10 or 20 more years).