Bug Tracker

#9051 closed enhancement (wontfix)

Opened May 02, 2011 10:26PM UTC

Closed May 02, 2011 10:34PM UTC

Last modified March 30, 2012 02:09PM UTC

Drop IE6 support

Reported by: JorisDebonnet Owned by:
Priority: low Milestone: 1.next
Component: core Version: git
Keywords: Cc:
Blocked by: Blocking:
Description

I strongly believe that at some point in the future, jQuery would benefit if support for IE6 was dropped. Not necessarily very soon, but this could just be given a long-term target. Perhaps even 2.0, although I wouldn't mind seeing it sooner :)

Of course people must have mentioned it before, but I couldn't find it in the tickets overview. So here it is.

Reasoning:

  • Many huge websites no longer support IE6 (Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, Apple,...). It looks like this relic of a browser is slowly dying, at long last.
  • People that feel it's important to support IE6, can still use the last jQuery version that does support it. They're not completely left out.
  • jQuery's file size grows as features and bug fixes are added. Dropping IE6 support would probably drop the file size a bit, both in existing code (if some people are up to finding those parts, of course) and in future code.
  • jQuery development becomes a little easier.
Attachments (0)
Change History (3)

Changed May 02, 2011 10:34PM UTC by timmywil comment:1

component: unfiled → core
priority: undecided → low
resolution: → wontfix
status: new → closed

Thank you for your interest in jQuery! Unfortunately, dropping IE6 support would not provide a significant benefit to development or the size of jQuery. Almost all, if not all, of the fixes for IE6 are applicable in IE7, and sometimes IE8 and IE9. We probably won't be dropping support for IE6 any time soon, or at least until the IE6 market share drops below 1%. Nevertheless, perhaps when the time for 2.0 comes around, we will be able to stop testing in IE6.

Changed May 03, 2011 02:38AM UTC by rwaldron comment:2

At the Bay Area jQuery Conference 2011, John actually stated that there will likely never be a jQuery 2.0. Aside from that, everything else timmywil said above holds.

Changed March 30, 2012 02:09PM UTC by psdie comment:3

Good decision here by jQuery devs. The OP may not need IE6 support, but literally millions of corporate users stuck on IE6 *do* need support. Removing support prematurely would break thousands of jQuery dependent web apps across the web (using latest jQuery ver) for those corporate users.

And for what? It's not going to dramatically reduce the codebase, or make much difference to performance (as jQuery uses latest browser features where they're available, falls back to compat code where needed). As the team note, apparently IE7 needs many of the same fixes anyway.

Don't forget one of the primary purposes of jQuery was as an abstraction layer so developers didn't need to worry whether the client natively supported XPath queries, CSS3 queries, full W3C DOM2/3 support, etc.