Regarding 1.9, how can "old-IE compatibility often causes problems of its own" and "simplest way to support older browsers is to use jQuery 1.x on your site, since it works for all browsers." both be true at one and the same time?
They're going to keep big-fixing 1.X so people stuck with IE6/7/8 can keep supporting it, but moving forward with 2.x for modern browsers makes their lives easier in the long run, and provides yet another coffin nail in Microsoft's attempt decade-old attempt to break the web.
Not that jQuery has the same kind of power but you can't ask people to move forward nicely, you have to drag them kicking and screaming.
On the contrary. Lots of big volume mainstream websites (including even Google properties) have stopped supporting IE6 and some even IE7 for years. For IE6 it has been at least 4 years since most sites stopped caring about it.
(Heck, even Microsoft created a site to convince people to drop IE6 it last year).
Mainstream websites will move much faster off of IE8. It's enterprise shops and people making software or websites targeted at them that will take the longest.
1) Opportunity cost. Supporting them takes time and makes your code more bloated and less able to use cool new stuff without hacks and workarounds (and that cool new stuff can give you a competitive advantage to the other 95%).
2) This 5% is only gonna go down.
3) 5% is too small anyway.
4) There might be 5% of traffic, but how much is quality traffic? Depending on the site, a guy with the latest laptop, OS, browser and everything might be more likely to spend money, compared to some XP using guy that might have gotten there accidentally. This needs more search into your user data to tell.
5) Even if you want to still cater to IE6, you don't have to support it per se. You can just make it generally sure that its user can click around and see the pages, even if they lose a lot of formatting and cool options. I mean, don't even go for "progressive enhancement" stuff. Just let them be able to at least see the page, even if it looks like crap without the necessary css etc support.
Granted, I can and will keep using 1.9
IOW: Cry me a river.
People made these exact arguments that people "require XP and MSIE8" and that they "can't upgrade" years ago, when Vista was released, then when Windows 7 was released and now with Windows 8's release.
Here's news for you: You've had 2 or 3 advance warnings from Microsoft that your IT platform will be obsoleted and unsupported and 2 non-ordinary support-extensions. You've had more than half a decade to plan and execute the migration.
If you haven't completed that migration yet and are still whining, you are incompetent as an IT manager. There is no other way to describe this. If you are still running XP, that is because of incompetence. No excuses.
XP is older than the very first release of Ubuntu. Microsoft has supported XP for longer than Ubuntu's entire existance. As a basis for comparison any version of Ubuntu is supported for 2 years and that's it. XP has been around for 12 years now, and will be supported for yet another year before support is finally dropped. Sometimes enough is enough.
This is a good move by jQuery to streamline their code-base. Sometimes you need to do the spring-cleaning if you want your code to be manageable and have any chance of effectively improving your product, and this is just that spring-cleaning.
probably instead throwing the vendors that don't want to support old IE...