Please ask for help on stackoverflow, the jQuery forums, or in the #jquery irc channel.

The jQuery 2.x branch does not support Internet Explorer 8 or below. See http://jquery.com/download/. Please use jQuery 1.11 which shares the API and feature set if you wish to use or support this browser.

While no informed person should expect the 2.x branch to support IE 8, not all developers that upgrade to the 2.x branch do so with the full knowledge that they are no longer supported. Take the original poster and myself for example.

Can 2.x be made to die more "gracefully" than "Object doesn't support property ..." ? Perhaps with a message like, '''"Your running IE 8 or your IE 10 is in compatibility mode, so this is going to end badly, if you don't learn how to load 1.x."

ANYTHING that gives even a tiny hint as to the source of the problem. Once the problem is understood. Solutions like the Meta field or testing for IE version to load the correct version of jQuery are easy to find and implement. The message could even point to a FAQ page.

In my case, while researching this issue, I even saw in the 2.1.0 release notes that IE 8 was not supported, but I knew that was not relevant to my issue because I was running 10. Also, some PCs crashed while others were fine.

Eventually, I reduced my test case to JUST LOADING jQuery and it still crashed. I finally got lucky and found someone else that crashed at the same line number and used the Meta solution. Turns out my troublesome IEs had "Display intranet sites in compatibility mode" checked.

It took several frustrating days to piece together the root cause WAS jQuery (and poorly designed IE). The solution took only a few minutes.

While I think the choice to strip a LOT of old code out of 2.x was right, is it too much to ask for a single test and message to spare thousand of other developers this same frustration?'''