jQuery 2.0 dropping support for Old IE

Yesterday the jQuery team announced their plan for the next three versions of their super popular JavaScript framework. To cut a long story short in 2013 there will be two versions of jQuery; 1.9 and 2.0. Version 1.9 will be the fairly standard update we are used to seeing, while version 2.0 will drop support for old versions of Internet Explorer; 6, 7 and 8.

When first seeing the headline for what they had planned for jQuery 2.0 I thought this was an aggressive move when these browsers unfortunately still hold a decent market share. But with IE’s conditional comments we will still be able to serve the Internet Explorer friendly version 1.9 to the old IE’s and then anything newer gets the advantages of version 2.0.

What advantages?

According to the jQuery team there is significant gain in removing many sections of the jQuery framework that deal with the quirks and incompatibilities of old IE’s. I can easily believe this and as the framework has grown significantly in size recently this reduction will be widely welcomed.

They also appear to be moving to make the framework more modular allowing the creation of custom builds, this will allow developers to choose which sections of jQuery their website requires. This again lowers the file size of the framework and so lowers the drain on user bandwidth. With an increase in mobile Internet users the need to keep websites lightweight has once again become a primary concern after the frivolity of the broadband years.

Why use jQuery at all?

At Bronco jQuery is included as standard in almost every new website we build. In my opinion JavaScript as always been a broken language, difficult to learn and requiring too much code to perform even the simplest of tasks.

At one time the language could be ignored and at times even best ignored as users can disable it from within their browser. But with websites adopting richer interfaces using the language is no longer a choice but a necessity. It’s for this reason why frameworks like jQuery have become so popular; it turns a one problematic task into something much simpler and with a hugely reduced learning curve.

Though JavaScript still has its uses today within the next few years we expect frameworks like jQuery to become the default, with only a few hard core purists not using frameworks when writing JavaScript. Their popularity may even lead to the more popular of these being integrated directly into our browsers rather than added to each website individually.