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Comment by agildehaus | Hacker News Reader

I can understand dropping 6 and 7, but 8? That browser's not going away anytime soon.

As I understand it, JQuery 1.9 and 2.0 are supposed to be API identical so what is suggested is to offer JQuery 1.9 to sub-IE9 via conditional comments.

That's one of the ways, but you can just stick to 1.9 for all of your audience if audience includes early IEs.

jQuery 2.0 is more appropriate for mobile web-apps or for intranets, where you know that users use strict subset of browsers

Given that jQuery 2.0 is supposed to be significantly faster, parent's approach offers increased speed to users who are not on sub-IE9 browsers.

Faster how? Do you have any source? Only thing I remember from my brief scan of the release notes was that it was faster to load as it was smaller (fewer browsers to support) but I don't recall anything about processing speed, happy to be proven wrong of course.

>jQuery 2.0 will not run on oldIE. As a result of removing several layers of barnacle-encrusted code, it will be both faster and smaller than jQuery 1.9.

My take here is that various bits of logic have been removed which will also improve processing speed.

Of course, they may have been referring to the load speed, and the increase in processing speed may be negligible.

It's going to have support for al IEs but as an official plugin and not in the main distribution (which is a good thing IMHO)

Do you have a link for that? I've only seen them say "if you need to support IE8, you need to use jQuery 1.9". No mention of a plugin.

IE8 is almost 4 years old. I think in another couple of years market share will easily be under 5%.

Sure, people on XP can't upgrade to another IE, but they can install Chrome, Firefox or Opera. In the corporate world, admins will upgrade to something else when they have to. With a little nudging maybe they'll have to sooner than later.

More importantly, it lacks the 10 years old DOM Level 2 and XHTML features, and DOM Level 2 is probably important for jQuery.

It and IE 9 also lack CORS support.

They are continuing support for both 1.9 (supporting IE6+) and 2.0

I'd be happy if they stopped supporting IE altogether.

Ten versions should be enough for Microsoft to get it right. If they haven't gotten it right by now, it's not going to happen.

Microsoft needs to fix their crap browser, rather than forcing every web dev on the planet to use nasty hacks and workarounds.

> Microsoft needs to fix their crap browser, rather than forcing every web dev on the planet to use nasty hacks and workarounds.

This is not a problem unique to IE. Firefox, Chome, Safari, and others all need shims/patches/etc too:

> But to the point about cross-browser issues, it’s a complete myth that today’s modern browsers have no differences. Look through the jQuery source code and you’ll see plenty of places where it has to fix, patch, and mask issues in modern browsers; those problems didn’t end with IE8. jQuery 2.0 now has more patches and shims for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox than for Internet Explorer!

http://blog.jquery.com/2013/01/14/the-state-of-jquery-2013/

So, how about we stop spreading myths and using vitriolic language, and provide constructive criticism and feedback so Microsoft and others can all fix bugs and issues with their browsers?

In my experience, it's not as terrible when things "break" in Chrome, FF or Safari, as it is when they break in IE.

Code that I write almost invariably works without change in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and all the others (including Opera), then I wind up having to do a bunch of hackery to make it work in IE.

I'm talking basic layout and JS functionality, not super-convoluted stuff like jQuery.

Sorry, it's an IE problem.

As for "constructive criticism and feedback": Microsoft has been ignoring it for the last 15 years. What makes you think they're going to start listening now?

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