10 ms·

I don't know if I can get behind this or not. I understand their desire but I don't see this as a viable option just yet. I'm not so concerned with 2.0 and 1.

by 51Cards 14y ago

I don't know if I can get behind this or not. I understand their desire but I don't see this as a viable option just yet. I'm not so concerned with 2.0 and 1.9 as you can load the right one, but what about when 2.1 comes out? Are they going to back-port all the new features to 1.9.1? If not then I now have a big fragmentation issue if I rely on anything specific to 2.1. Don't forget that IE 8 is the last version XP will get and XP is going to be out there for a long time yet (sadly), especially in corporate environments. Effectively (as far as IE only environments are concerned) JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS.

yxhuvud 14y ago
Don't be silly. There are alternative browsers. XP will not lack proper web access. Yes, I realize corporate settings can be inflexible enough that it won't happen in some corporations, but isn't it a good thing that corporate IT get more pressure to accomodate?
wycats 14y ago
The cycle here is pretty long: jQuery 2.0 will be released in "Early 2013". For some time (probably at least 6 months if not longer), jQuery 1.9 and 2.x will be perfectly API compatible. That means that the conditional comment approach will work with very little downside. That gets us to summer or Fall 2013. At this point, there may be a release of jQuery 2.1. According to the blog post, it will probably contain few new features, and some speed improvements. It will almost certainly not break backwards API compatibility. At this point, you can upgrade to jQuery 2.1 for the speed improvements and simply not use the new features. The conditional comment approach will still work. That gets us to Spring 2014. At this point, Microsoft will EOL Windows XP. It's frankly hard for me to imagine more than a tiny number of Windows XP users using IE8 at this point. There was a lot of similar-sounding concern about IE6, which has mercifully vanished. IE8 was at 30% last November; it is now down to 15%. Even at this point, a jQuery 2.2 will likely not break API backwards compatibility. If IE8 clingers are more stubborn than we expect, we can always modify the strategy to be more aggressive about strict compatibility between the branches. Unfortunately, many of us are still fighting the last war, where the cutting edge (IE6->IE7) was plodding and the slow upgrading tail was huge. It's time that we acknowledged that the ecosystem has changed: the slow upgrading tail grows smaller all the time, as the cutting edge absorbs more of the mindless browser population. At the same time, the pace of the cutting edge grows faster and faster. We aren't quite there yet, but we should prepare for a future that is not a simple clone of the 2004-2008 era of browser development.
- tambourine_man 14y ago
  At the same time, the pace of the cutting edge grows faster and faster. It better grow pretty fast. By late 2012, jQuery will still be supporting a browser released in 2001 but by early 2013 it won't support a browser that was only replaced by MS in 2011. Corporate America is not IE8's only domain. There are a lot of people who don't even know what a browser is. And IE8 was the default browser on Windows 7.
  - jlarocco 14y ago
    You know what? At this point I'm not sure it's worth catering to people who "don't even know what a browser is." They've had nearly 20 years to hop on the bandwagon and start understanding this crazy "internet" thing, and they haven't. A person that behind the times isn't going to buy anything on the internet anyway.
    - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
      You shouldn't assume that everyone with money or education shares all of the same interests as you.
    - trafficlight 14y ago
      I can't imagine the internet is very useful or fun for those people either. Every other site must be broken in some way. And that's still not enough for them to ask someone about it.
      - DougWebb 14y ago
        That's what they call "The Internet". They may wonder why everyone else likes it so much, or they like it well enough as they see it that they're not even aware of what they're missing. I'm not much of a car guy, but I like my car just fine. Someone who's really into cars and has test-driven hundreds of them could probably point out dozens of deficiencies in my car and the way I drive it that I'm totally oblivious to. He might not like my car at all, but I'm happy with it and see no reason to 'upgrade' it. Same goes for any other product field, hobby, interest, etc. People who are more interested are better acquainted with what's available and the way to get the best experience, and people who are less interested are happy enough with their point of view and oblivious to any short-comings.
aaronblohowiak 14y ago
>JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS. doesnt chrome work on xp?
- ahoge 14y ago
  Every browser vendor still supports Windows XP. The only exception is Microsoft. IE9 only works on Vista and Win7. IE10 will only work on Win7 and Win8.
  - soyummy 14y ago
    So if everyone is flipping shit about how outrageous it is to not support IE7/8... why do we let Microsoft slide on not supporting their own damned product?
    - notJim 14y ago
      Because we live in the real world, where complaining to Microsoft doesn't make up for lost revenue.
- rmc 14y ago
  Firefox aswell
melling 14y ago
People will switch from IE when they have to. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all run well on XP. As for corporate America, they'll wait it out as long as they can too. However, if forced, technology departments are quite capable of installing Chrome or Firefox. I don't feel sorry for corporations who have IE[6-8] only apps. I was there 10 years ago when people said that it only had to run in IE, when I said we should test in Firefox too.
- jakejake 14y ago
  agreed. They'll only replace those systems when the expense of maintaining them is greater than re-writing. I'm 100% in favor of making it increasingly more painful for companies to hold back progress. I do have to say that my impression from comments that some devs don't actually comprehend the scope of the trouble for some of these companies. On the surface you might think it's just a lazy IT department who won't upgrade the browsers. But really the situation is that companies built their internal infrastructure using things like ActiveX components for IE and these systems are probably more like desktop apps than web-based apps. They use all of the old IE components to interact with the desktop and do things that may still not even be possible with a regular web-based app. So it is not necessarily that they're surfing the web with IE6 because they're too lazy to upgrade the browsers or their javascript code - rather they are stuck with it because they have huge infrastructure that depends on those old components to run. It's hard to actually understand that now, but at the time 15 years ago it was really cutting edge stuff and MS managed to get some serious vendor lock-in.
  - jtheory 14y ago
    Add in that they may be using these custom apps to handle medical data, or financial data, or something similar that can cost lives or staggering sums of money if a browser upgrade causes even subtle errors... so there's a time-consuming and very costly certification process that must happen even for rewritten software, on top of the cost of development. And certification would need to happen again before any subsequent browser upgrades. So I hate supporting IE6, but I'm working in health care, so I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be supporting IE6 for a while yet.
dmethvin 14y ago
> JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS. What time limit? The blog post says jQuery 1.9 will be supported even after 2.0 is released, and that the two APIs will be the same.
- 51Cards 14y ago
  If you look further into my comment you'll see I mention when 2.1 comes out. I doubt they will be back-porting 2.1 features into 1.9, and thus the time limit.
  - bronson 14y ago
    Only if you can't live without some feature in 2.1 and can't backport it yourself. What jQuery 2.1 feature can't you live without?
  - gnarf 14y ago
    The plan is if we ever release a 2.1 to backport what makes sense to a 1.10 if the oldIE's are still a big enough market share. I'd also like to point out that this concern only comes into play 2 years from now. We are not intending to drop support for oldIE forever, but we do want to make jQuery smaller and as efficient as possible in the newer browsers, and leaving all the oldIE code in as we progress past these browsers wastes time.
sabat 14y ago
This flat-out does not make sense. We all may hate IE6, 7, and 8, but a vast number of people still use it, and leaving them out just means alienating an audience and customers. Why do it? Spite?
- gnarf 14y ago
  Because removing all of the special case code paths in jQuery 2.0 will inevitably remove bytes from the library, allow us to use newer browser features with less polyfills, and increase performance for modern browsers. Read the post, we are not "dropping support" - 1.9 is going to be API compatible with 2.0.
nnash 14y ago
I agree, I can understand IE6 since not even ms supports it anymore but 7 and 8? Seems a bit drastic to me.

by 51Cards 14y ago

yxhuvud 14y ago

Don't be silly. There are alternative browsers. XP will not lack proper web access. Yes, I realize corporate settings can be inflexible enough that it won't happen in some corporations, but isn't it a good thing that corporate IT get more pressure to accomodate?

wycats 14y ago

The cycle here is pretty long: jQuery 2.0 will be released in "Early 2013". For some time (probably at least 6 months if not longer), jQuery 1.9 and 2.x will be perfectly API compatible. That means that the conditional comment approach will work with very little downside. That gets us to summer or Fall 2013. At this point, there may be a release of jQuery 2.1. According to the blog post, it will probably contain few new features, and some speed improvements. It will almost certainly not break backwards API compatibility. At this point, you can upgrade to jQuery 2.1 for the speed improvements and simply not use the new features. The conditional comment approach will still work. That gets us to Spring 2014. At this point, Microsoft will EOL Windows XP. It's frankly hard for me to imagine more than a tiny number of Windows XP users using IE8 at this point. There was a lot of similar-sounding concern about IE6, which has mercifully vanished. IE8 was at 30% last November; it is now down to 15%. Even at this point, a jQuery 2.2 will likely not break API backwards compatibility. If IE8 clingers are more stubborn than we expect, we can always modify the strategy to be more aggressive about strict compatibility between the branches. Unfortunately, many of us are still fighting the last war, where the cutting edge (IE6->IE7) was plodding and the slow upgrading tail was huge. It's time that we acknowledged that the ecosystem has changed: the slow upgrading tail grows smaller all the time, as the cutting edge absorbs more of the mindless browser population. At the same time, the pace of the cutting edge grows faster and faster. We aren't quite there yet, but we should prepare for a future that is not a simple clone of the 2004-2008 era of browser development.

tambourine_man 14y ago
At the same time, the pace of the cutting edge grows faster and faster. It better grow pretty fast. By late 2012, jQuery will still be supporting a browser released in 2001 but by early 2013 it won't support a browser that was only replaced by MS in 2011. Corporate America is not IE8's only domain. There are a lot of people who don't even know what a browser is. And IE8 was the default browser on Windows 7.
- jlarocco 14y ago
  You know what? At this point I'm not sure it's worth catering to people who "don't even know what a browser is." They've had nearly 20 years to hop on the bandwagon and start understanding this crazy "internet" thing, and they haven't. A person that behind the times isn't going to buy anything on the internet anyway.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    You shouldn't assume that everyone with money or education shares all of the same interests as you.
  - trafficlight 14y ago
    I can't imagine the internet is very useful or fun for those people either. Every other site must be broken in some way. And that's still not enough for them to ask someone about it.
    - DougWebb 14y ago
      That's what they call "The Internet". They may wonder why everyone else likes it so much, or they like it well enough as they see it that they're not even aware of what they're missing. I'm not much of a car guy, but I like my car just fine. Someone who's really into cars and has test-driven hundreds of them could probably point out dozens of deficiencies in my car and the way I drive it that I'm totally oblivious to. He might not like my car at all, but I'm happy with it and see no reason to 'upgrade' it. Same goes for any other product field, hobby, interest, etc. People who are more interested are better acquainted with what's available and the way to get the best experience, and people who are less interested are happy enough with their point of view and oblivious to any short-comings.

aaronblohowiak 14y ago

>JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS. doesnt chrome work on xp?

ahoge 14y ago
Every browser vendor still supports Windows XP. The only exception is Microsoft. IE9 only works on Vista and Win7. IE10 will only work on Win7 and Win8.
- soyummy 14y ago
  So if everyone is flipping shit about how outrageous it is to not support IE7/8... why do we let Microsoft slide on not supporting their own damned product?
  - notJim 14y ago
    Because we live in the real world, where complaining to Microsoft doesn't make up for lost revenue.
rmc 14y ago
Firefox aswell

melling 14y ago

People will switch from IE when they have to. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all run well on XP. As for corporate America, they'll wait it out as long as they can too. However, if forced, technology departments are quite capable of installing Chrome or Firefox. I don't feel sorry for corporations who have IE[6-8] only apps. I was there 10 years ago when people said that it only had to run in IE, when I said we should test in Firefox too.

jakejake 14y ago
agreed. They'll only replace those systems when the expense of maintaining them is greater than re-writing. I'm 100% in favor of making it increasingly more painful for companies to hold back progress. I do have to say that my impression from comments that some devs don't actually comprehend the scope of the trouble for some of these companies. On the surface you might think it's just a lazy IT department who won't upgrade the browsers. But really the situation is that companies built their internal infrastructure using things like ActiveX components for IE and these systems are probably more like desktop apps than web-based apps. They use all of the old IE components to interact with the desktop and do things that may still not even be possible with a regular web-based app. So it is not necessarily that they're surfing the web with IE6 because they're too lazy to upgrade the browsers or their javascript code - rather they are stuck with it because they have huge infrastructure that depends on those old components to run. It's hard to actually understand that now, but at the time 15 years ago it was really cutting edge stuff and MS managed to get some serious vendor lock-in.
- jtheory 14y ago
  Add in that they may be using these custom apps to handle medical data, or financial data, or something similar that can cost lives or staggering sums of money if a browser upgrade causes even subtle errors... so there's a time-consuming and very costly certification process that must happen even for rewritten software, on top of the cost of development. And certification would need to happen again before any subsequent browser upgrades. So I hate supporting IE6, but I'm working in health care, so I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be supporting IE6 for a while yet.

dmethvin 14y ago

> JQuery has just set a time limit on proper web access for an entire OS. What time limit? The blog post says jQuery 1.9 will be supported even after 2.0 is released, and that the two APIs will be the same.

51Cards 14y ago
If you look further into my comment you'll see I mention when 2.1 comes out. I doubt they will be back-porting 2.1 features into 1.9, and thus the time limit.
- bronson 14y ago
  Only if you can't live without some feature in 2.1 and can't backport it yourself. What jQuery 2.1 feature can't you live without?
- gnarf 14y ago
  The plan is if we ever release a 2.1 to backport what makes sense to a 1.10 if the oldIE's are still a big enough market share. I'd also like to point out that this concern only comes into play 2 years from now. We are not intending to drop support for oldIE forever, but we do want to make jQuery smaller and as efficient as possible in the newer browsers, and leaving all the oldIE code in as we progress past these browsers wastes time.

sabat 14y ago

This flat-out does not make sense. We all may hate IE6, 7, and 8, but a vast number of people still use it, and leaving them out just means alienating an audience and customers. Why do it? Spite?

gnarf 14y ago
Because removing all of the special case code paths in jQuery 2.0 will inevitably remove bytes from the library, allow us to use newer browser features with less polyfills, and increase performance for modern browsers. Read the post, we are not "dropping support" - 1.9 is going to be API compatible with 2.0.

nnash 14y ago

I agree, I can understand IE6 since not even ms supports it anymore but 7 and 8? Seems a bit drastic to me.