This is a retarded decision which I do not support.
IE6 fine, IE7 fine but not IE8. IE8 is required for most corporate environments where they haven't killed of Windows XP yet. That is a surprisingly large amount of people.
If this happens, we'll fork jQuery 1.9 and support it separately.
2 will come out in 2013 just a bit before Microsoft officially removes all support for XP. If your IT department hasn't made moves to upgrade everyone from XP by this point you have bigger issues to deal with than jQuery availability.
Forced obsolescence doesn't mean people aren't still using it and it doesn't mean that because Microsoft stop patching that it's still vulnerable. Using it after April 2014 is not a problem.
The NHS in the UK has over 1 million Windows XP deployments out there still on NHSnet which is a nationwide secure private WAN. A lot of software vendors have to support that.
Yeah this is exactly the thing. It's not like 1.9 or 1.8 or even 1.4 will stop working in the future when the new versions are released.
I duplicated a project for a client today that needed a one-page form and a two-page admin section, and I have only a couple of hours of budget to make it work. They don't care that it's running jQuery 1.3.x. It's working fine.
Really? That seems a little harsh. It's free, it's open source, and it's made web development hugely more productive for massive numbers of us for the last 5 years or so.
That it has, but it has still been very buggy for us. We use a number of commercial and open source products and it's the worst supported, least reliable of the lot. The developers don't seem to take defect reports seriously, there is no consistency between releases and the plugin ecosystem is like a landfill site (full of poorly written crap with a few gems here and there).
I genuinely wish at this point that we'd written our own smaller, tighter framework. Unfortunately, a huge amount of lock in is present now, so it's a case of trashing it entirely.
That argument doesn't really hold though. You're not upgrading your base(the OS) to fix the problems with it yet you're complaining about a minor(in the grand scheme of things) library removing support in a modern version. If your network is closed off like the NHS one you mention, why not just stick with the old versions you've already fixed?
It's like complaining your 56' Chevy doesn't work with the new battery technology coming out in the Chevy Volt.
The problem comes is that the older versions that we've fixed have the fixes integrated in later versions.
We really don't want to have to maintain the versions that we've fixed as that kills the entire value proposition of using it in the first place.
It's nothing like the 56' Chevy / Volt analogy. The technology is the same - they just can't be bothered with supporting one vendor's product any more.
Why do those fixes matter? Again if you're in a closed environment then you can surely control the versions of a JS library. So fix it until it works in your space then move on. Them dropping support for your outdated choice of platform isn't a problem. Your desire to use cutting edge software with your outdated platform is the problem.
Picking a platform and sticking with it is a nobel and occasionally needed position to have. Expecting everyone else to hold themselves back because you chose to do so is impossibly greedy however.
IE6 fine, IE7 fine but not IE8. IE8 is required for most corporate environments where they haven't killed of Windows XP yet. That is a surprisingly large amount of people.
If this happens, we'll fork jQuery 1.9 and support it separately.