It does seem a strange decision. They even address it in their post:
"jQuery was conceived specifically to address the differences in browsers, so we’re not going to abandon the essence of our philosophy and simply disregard the millions [still using] oldIE. Yet we also want to move ahead and take advantage of modern browsers, especially the growing mobile market."
The whole point of jQuery is that it's supposed to allow you to move ahead without losing backwards compatibility. Making this split -- especially with a version number, which implies a feature-freeze for 1.9 and new stuff only in 2.0 -- seems like they're just admitting defeat on their primary function.
I think they just realized they can continue to support the old IE versions while other JS libraries advance in functionality, or they can stay competitive.
Which other libraries would those be? (I'm serious.)
There were several fairly well known libraries a couple of years ago, but as far as I can tell, jQuery won that battle decisively. It has almost 100% penetration in the projects I'm familiar with that use a general purpose JS library, and it seems to be the default for articles and blog posts I find on-line these days too.
Part of that success came from the ecosystem reaching critical mass. Many people know jQuery. Many plug-ins are available for jQuery. And the vast installed base usually means quick bug fixes even for recent browser compatibility problems.
If there is something out there that is better by a wide enough margin to justify giving up that established ecosystem, I'd love to hear about it. The ecosystem has plenty of imperfections, but I haven't come across anything yet that seems nearly comprehensive enough to displace the incumbent here.
I think jQuery 2.0 is partly a response to Zepto.js [1] -- they're both jQuery-API-compatible, and they both drop support for OldIE (Zepto drops all of IE, though [2]).
> If there is something out there that is better by a wide enough margin to justify giving up that established ecosystem, I'd love to hear about it. The ecosystem has plenty of imperfections, but I haven't come across anything yet that seems nearly comprehensive enough to displace the incumbent here.
David Mark's My Library[0] is the best DOM library available by a wide margin. It has supreme browser support, and it's "modular" with a custom builder. The code is so solid that many people have borrowed from it, including the jQuery project and myself.
I've also created a DOM library, but with a more limited feature set (it's only a few months old). See my submissions for details.
The JS community has moved beyond DOM abstraction libraries entirely. Using polyfills is now the preferred way to reach older browsers. JQuery serves a role of abstracting the stuff that polyfills can't fix, or to go all the way back to IE6 where the differences are too great to mess with on your own. Without that, there really is no reason to use JQuery at all.
To be worth shifting away from the jQuery ecosystem to something new, the latter needs a compelling advantage and it needs to not have any deal-breaking disadvantages. Nothing I've come across so far myself seems to meet both criteria.
I'm sorry if we imply a feature freeze by bumping to 2.0... I'm not where you got that. The plan is to backport any API changes to 1.9 or even 1.10 if we need to make one in 2014.
Here is the magic: IE 6 - 8 are not popular browsers. They are only used if the person using them doesn't know what a browser is. And all it would take for them to switch is one webpage they use popping up "You are using an outdated unsupported vulnerable awful browser, here are Firefox or Chrome, take your pick and don't ruin your web experience any more".
And the corporate clients could finally get through their heads it is not ok to expect employees to be accessing the internet through IE. Businesses don't have the rights to stick their fingers in their ears singing 'lalala' while the internet attempts to grow around the tumour of conditional comments and other crap.
Unfortunately it's not a matter of sticking fingers in your ears, I can tell you. If you've got 50-100,000 workstations to worry about, and a couple of intranet apps that only run in older versions (there are more of these than you might think,) upgrading IE could be a fabulously large and expensive project.
Still you gotta catch up at some point. The product I work on is dropping IE8 in January, which will cause some of our larger and less nimble customers to get stuck on an older version until they can fix their browser situation.
"If you've got 50-100,000 workstations to worry about, and a couple of intranet apps that only run in older versions (there are more of these than you might think,) upgrading IE could be a fabulously large and expensive project."
So... don't upgrade IE, but give people the option of - you know - running another browser. The IT folks can even lock it down so no one can do anything useful with it, but they could give people firefox, chrome, safari or opera as another tool on their desktop.
Holding back an entire company's ability to do any modern browsing because you're still tied to one HR intranet app from 2003 is just silly. There's no sane argument to be made for it, in light of the short- and long-term opportunity costs it imposes.
A nasty situation no doubt, but manageable. What I would do is:
0. Rename IE to 'intranet'.
1. Configure IE to only access Intranet.
2. Switch everyone to chrome/firefox, keep bookmarks, etc
3. Hire some university students to temp man the support line as you are flooded with support requests.
As I said a nasty situation. Perhaps it would be best to spread a rumour that someone was fired thanks to IE. That way you are not evil IT getting in the way of everyone's job.
It isn't sticking fingers in ears, it is yelling at business that software can not be treated like vending machines where you buy one model that lasts decades on end regardless of what new revisions come out. The vulnerabilities and inefficiencies of the old IE browsers are detrimental to the businesses that are resisting change, and the entire web supporting the bad habit is why change doesn't come.
People won't switch because sites are hectoring them with lectures about how something they might be fine with is actually awful. All it would take for them to switch are compelling apps (whatever definition of "compelling" applies to each person) which exploit the capabilities of, and therefore require, the newer browsers, and whose existence is advertised to them. Not "your browser is bad and you should feel bad", but "this site is awesome and will make you feel awesome, there's just one thing - you need to install this awesome browser to get your ticket to awesomeville". Same as any other platform.
Not sure if you read the article, but 1.9 and 2.0 will basically be the same, just different underlying code. 1.9 will support IE<9, and 2.0 will be smaller/faster/more stable
It's really not that simple. Now you have to check to see if a plugins support 1.9 or 2.0, and plugin writers will have to support both or IE8 supporters will have to live without new plugins.
The article specifically states that 1.9 and 2.0 will be API compatible. So no, you won't have to do anything other than include the proper version and forget about it.
> Fuck IE - they've done the same to us for years.
You're not "fucking IE" though, you're fucking the end-users; many of whom might be stuck on XP (and therefore IE8) without a huge choice. Corporate users, education users, those without the money to upgrade their OS/machine, etc.
The reason IE is still clinging on is because not enough people are making noise about it.
The less usable the net is for older browsers, the closer we move the users of those browsers to the threshold of upgrading.
It may mean more complaints from the staff to the IT department, it may mean grandma asking her grandkids why the google is broken, but if enough people are vocal about it, it will encourage upgrading.
Every time you support IE, you are slowing the uptake of newer browsers, and you are a bad person for it.
Why are XP users stuck on IE8? (I mean I think there are a myriad of options that are pretty reasonable). It doesn't cost anything or fairly little labor to upgrade to a real browser over the course of a couple years. How far do we take this, why don't we all support IE5? It's time to let it go.
You can either stick with JQuery 1.9 for as long as you want to support IE8 (hopefully not more than 10 or 20 more years).
Corporate: the only reason for this is because web apps and sites are written for a particular browser, and not based on standards.
Awareness: when sites don't work, they'll be aware of the problems. The truth is, most users at getting more educated about browsers all the time. It can't e helped that Microsoft has tied browser innovation and standardisation to their operating system.
Familiarity: really fairly bogus as an argument. There is really not that much different between the interfaces of Opera, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox these days!
Those are bad reasons to hold the web back. They don't adapt because they're lazy or don't know better. Making it hard to use obsolete browsers is doing them a favor. They'll like the present when they try it.
Dropping support for popular browsers doesn't seem to help me much.