jQuery 2.0, planned for early 2013, will drop the support for IE6-7-8
Sky High Code: jQuery 2.0 ends WinXP support - Good.
Interesting article, interesting news from jQuery! It is seriously great step for jQuery to stop the support of IE8,7,6, depicting overall programmers opinion about these versions.
As what jQuery officials have explained on (source), all those hooks used to fix oldIE compatibility issues made the jQuery run slower for modern browsers. Minding the percentage of IE6-7-8 users, this is a logical step forward. Luckily, starting from early 2013, when this change is planned, would mean adding a simple condition checking whether browser is IE8- and loading jQuery1.9, and otherwise loading jQuery2.0.
Interesting article, interesting news from jQuery! It is seriously great step for jQuery to stop the support of IE8,7,6, depicting overall programmers opinion about these versions.
As what jQuery officials have explained on (source), all those hooks used to fix oldIE compatibility issues made the jQuery run slower for modern browsers. Minding the percentage of IE6-7-8 users, this is a logical step forward. Luckily, starting from early 2013, when this change is planned, would mean adding a simple condition checking whether browser is IE8- and loading jQuery1.9, and otherwise loading jQuery2.0.
I could imagine a issues that people using CDN and latest jQuery versions would come up with, if they forget to make the correct condition switch.
However,
1) If my clients aren't willing to stay current, then it's time for me to find new clients
I dont think everyone can change their clients like that. Even suggesting to switch to IE9 might cause performance problems as the computers they own are usually from pre-historic times and it was probably already heavy workload to start those IE6-7-8. As long as there is some decent percentage of clients using IE6-7-8, the most companies would prefer to support them. However, as it seems here, APIs are the same, so there would not be bigger development issues right now. But will it stay also in future, with newer versions of jQuery? Would they at some point start to use different APIs as well, causing a need for addition development for oldIE browsers, just to make them compatible? This should mainly be the concern of company's management to decide whether the cost of additional and in most of the cases rather expensive development, or simply take up the risk and advise clients to modernize a bit.
However,
1) If my clients aren't willing to stay current, then it's time for me to find new clients
I dont think everyone can change their clients like that. Even suggesting to switch to IE9 might cause performance problems as the computers they own are usually from pre-historic times and it was probably already heavy workload to start those IE6-7-8. As long as there is some decent percentage of clients using IE6-7-8, the most companies would prefer to support them. However, as it seems here, APIs are the same, so there would not be bigger development issues right now. But will it stay also in future, with newer versions of jQuery? Would they at some point start to use different APIs as well, causing a need for addition development for oldIE browsers, just to make them compatible? This should mainly be the concern of company's management to decide whether the cost of additional and in most of the cases rather expensive development, or simply take up the risk and advise clients to modernize a bit.
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