Updated GNU Framework Tries To Push "Free JavaScript"

[AJenbo]

If you need IE8 support, then just keep using the 1.x branch. You shouldn't be sad that 2.x dropped IE8 support, because ditching "difficult" browsers like IE8 is the entire reason for 2.x to exist.... providing a leaner version that doesn't have to include the overhead of supporting those older and less-compliant browsers. Because IE9 is really the line in the sand, the point where IE became "good enough"... something that could be treated as just another browser variant instead of some abomination that nobody wants to deal with...

No i'm just sad that i have to support it... or that it is shit, take your pick

[Delgarde]

No i'm just sad that i have to support it... or that it is shit, take your pick

Fair enough... I certainly can't dispute that. IE8 was much better than it's predecessor in terms of standards compliance, but still pretty deficient compared to, well, everything that wasn't IE.

[AJenbo]

Fair enough... I certainly can't dispute that. IE8 was much better than it's predecessor in terms of standards compliance, but still pretty deficient compared to, well, everything that wasn't IE.

The situation is made much wheres by MS's odd policy of only supporting IE on the latest two of there active OS's, yet supporting them for the life time of the OS they launched with (IE8 came with Win7 so it's going to hang around for a long time, IE6 will end in april!). Everybody else mange to have feature parity on all of supported Window versions, as well as other OS's. IE11 is missing major features like SPDY on Win7!

[curaga]

AFAIK they have no intention to EOL the 1.x branch that supports all the way back to IE6. I am a little sad that 2.x drops IE8 as I have to support that one

That won't help you when $RANDOM_SITE you have no control over uses the latest shiny.

@Delgarde

Not talking about IE support, talking about Opera and FF support. Major-1 is too little. Consider the LTS Firefox version for example, that would often be unsupported by jquery.

[randomizer]

That won't help you when $RANDOM_SITE you have no control over uses the latest shiny.

What does that have to do with what you quoted? Besides, if you're using IE8 and that $RANDOM_SITE doesn't support your browser you can upgrade or go elsewhere. The site owner clearly doesn't care about you.

Consider the LTS Firefox version for example, that would often be unsupported by jquery.

Unsupported doesn't mean it won't work. It means they're not writing tests to make sure that it does. Given that Chrome and Firefox are only incrementally changing between versions it's probably not going to matter anyway.

[AJenbo]

Unsupported doesn't mean it won't work. It means they're not writing tests to make sure that it does. Given that Chrome and Firefox are only incrementally changing between versions it's probably not going to matter anyway.

I would grant him that it would be nice if they tested with the latest LTS (actually ESR), currently it is Firefox 24 and before that it was 17. I know of a company that almost exclusively uses Mac PowerPc and therefor the only modern browser available is a community build of the latest Firefox ESR. And I'm sure other companies might have there reasons for sticking to a Firefox ESR. That being said current jQuery is from May 2013, so they actually have tested with Firefox 22 and up.

[curaga]

What does that have to do with what you quoted? Besides, if you're using IE8 and that $RANDOM_SITE doesn't support your browser you can upgrade or go elsewhere. The site owner clearly doesn't care about you.

Please follow the whole quote chain. AJenbo says it's not a big deal that latest $FRAMEWORK drops browser support if they support it in a legacy branch. I contend that it's still a problem, because you don't have any control over what remote sites use.

Thus a popular framework has the power to break half the web for you if you happen to use a certain browser. Even if the site owner cared, they may be torn between browser support and $NEW_SHINY in the new version they require for $APPLE_USERS, who bring more ad cash.

Unsupported doesn't mean it won't work. It means they're not writing tests to make sure that it does. Given that Chrome and Firefox are only incrementally changing between versions it's probably not going to matter anyway.

It means they may break it at will, and all bugs will be closed as WONTFIX. Then once it breaks half the web, you're SOL until the next ESR version comes, as many organizations have restrictions on such.

[AJenbo]

Thus a popular framework has the power to break half the web for you if you happen to use a certain browser. Even if the site owner cared, they may be torn between browser support and $NEW_SHINY in the new version they require for $APPLE_USERS, who bring more ad cash.

The site owner is responsible for picking a framework and version and there by decide on who they support. With out jQuery it is likely that the same sites would support even fewer browsers as they would have less time to do so.

[Veerappan]

I don't mind JS frameworks/libraries only supporting MAJOR-1 for Firefox/Chrome. They're usually updated fairly frequently and so having to support all versions released in the last 2-3 years is a pretty major burden to ask them to take on.

Where I work, we do Java/JSP-based software for clients who are running internally-accessible web sites. We support IE8+, and the latest Chrome/Safari/Firefox. We based that on studies of our users' web browser distributions. It's all about knowing your audience in this case. Some clients have IT departments which restrict them to IE-only, and they're still running XP machines (ugh).

Sometime soon, we'll hopefully be able to deprecate IE8 support and jump to IE9 (or maybe even 10/11). And to be fair, we've never had issues with JQuery having faulty support of older firefox versions... IE's almost always the problem child, and the world will be better off when everyone has upgraded away from IE7/8.

[AJenbo]

We based that on studies of our users' web browser distributions. It's all about knowing your audience in this case. Some clients have IT departments which restrict them to IE-only, and they're still running XP machines (ugh).

Sometime soon, we'll hopefully be able to deprecate IE8 support and jump to IE9 (or maybe even 10/11). And to be fair, we've never had issues with JQuery having faulty support of older firefox versions... IE's almost always the problem child, and the world will be better off when everyone has upgraded away from IE7/8.

Sounds very much like what I am working width in the wild.

IE10 is available for Vista so in theory we could axe IE9- as soon as XP dies in april. In reality tough I still see about 1,5% of the visitors using IE8 on Win7 (the one it shipped with).