Buzzyr

jQuery in 2013 – or How to Properly Drop IE

It’s a well-known fact that the folks at Microsoft have long had their tail between their legs, because of IE. The proverbial enemy of every front-end developer and the go-to brunt of the joke at conferences and chatrooms (and even in client meetings) has been IE8 and below.

Let’s move past the IE bashing, and talk about jQuery’s plan to drop support for old IE.

Don’t entirely drop old IE until its usage is miniscule.

Certainly, there are plenty of web development firms that have already dropped support. Most of us have long since dropped IE6, with many doing the same for IE7. But there is still a significant push to hold on to the IE8 crowd.

The jQuery team has been plagued by IE for years. JavaScript in old IE (their collective moniker for anything below IE9) is antiquated, slow, and lacks the new features added to the language since their respective launches. As a result, the codebase of jQuery must incorporate solutions to handle issues specific to IE. This makes the library significantly larger, and as a result, it takes a lot longer to load. So, as part of version 2.0, jQuery will be dropping support for old IE.