What jQuery 2.0 Means to Developers

On April 18, 2013, at long last, jQuery 2.0 emerged from Beta and was released to the public. The jQuery library has evolved a lot since it was first released, along with the way that developers use this iconic tool. The 2.0 release includes a couple of significant changes that affect how developers use jQuery, and in this post, I'll discuss what these changes mean to developers.

Dropping Support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8

Many people seem to have overly focused mainly on what jQuery 2.0 does not do - that is, support older versions of Internet Explorer, 6 through 8. The jQuery team decided to split the library into two different versions: the 1.x line, which will continue to evolve and support older browsers, and the new 2.x line, which will remain feature compatible with 1.x while focusing on modern browsers.

This was absolutely the right decision by the jQuery team, for several reasons. Two of the most important reasons are:

• The usage of IE 6-8 continues to decline, and according to the jQuery team, they were able to shrink the size of the library by 12% just by taking out the patches needed to support these older browsers.
• The HTML5 development landscape is a lot more diverse than it was even just a few years ago, and continuing to support older browsers would have held jQuery back. I'll go into more detail about this below.

At first glance, this decision may seem a bit bold, especially since Windows XP still has a significant market share at the moment and IE8 is still in widespread use on that platform. However, since jQuery 1.x will continue to support these browsers, this essentially means that developers need to think in advance about where and how their app will be used, and consider the audience for their application.

HTML5 is No Longer Just About the Web

Notice that I didn't title this post "What jQuery 2.0 Means to Web Developers"? I did that very purposely, as a lot of development around HTML5 is increasingly no longer directly tied to Web browsers. Several application platforms have emerged that use HTML5 as their development language, and for these platforms, the notion of older browser support simply isn't very relevant.

• Chrome Packaged Apps
• Firefox OS Apps
• Blackberry 10 Apps
• Android and iOS Web View based Apps
• Windows 8 "Metro" Apps
• PhoneGap / Cordova Apps
• Browser Plugins for Safari, Firefox, and Chrome

In these and many other up-and-coming scenarios, support for older IE versions isn't needed and results in dead code that will never be executed. By removing this code from version 2.0, the jQuery team can spend more focus on modern development scenarios, which will help position the library for further growth and adoption in the scenarios I've listed above as well as newer ones that haven't even come along yet.

As a result of this change, jQuery 2.0 is just 82K when minified - and that's for the whole standard library. But jQuery introduced a modular build system back in 1.8. Use the custom build system to exclude things you don't need, and you can get it down to under 20K.

These two steps - dropping support for older IE versions and introducing a modular build system - are, in my opinion, two of the most important changes that jQuery has made in the past few versions. They make jQuery more attractive for application development beyond just web sites, which opens a whole new set of opportunities for the library, as well as additional potential sources of innovation and contribution.

So Which Version Should You Use?

The decision about which version of jQuery to use isn't really that complicated. If a project that you are working on needs to run on older browsers, then you should stick with jQuery 1.x. If the project doesn’t need to work on those older browsers, or you're building an app for one of the platforms I listed above, then you can move to the newer 2.x branch.

You can use IE Conditional Comments to make sure that the user's browser gets delivered the right version of the library by using the following code (from the jQuery blog):

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="/path/to/jquery-1.9.1.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 9]><!-->
<script src="/path/to/jquery-2.0.js"></script>
<!--<![endif]-->

Of course, Conditional Comments are going away in IE 10, but since IE10 is a much more capable, modern browser, that won’t matter and the above code will continue to work - IE10 will just get the 2.0 version.

When jQuery was first released, its two primary purposes were a) to abstract away differences among browser APIs and b) make manipulating the DOM a lot easier and more predictable. Since then, it has become far more useful and versatile, and the 2.0 release takes it a further step in the world beyond the web browser.

The decision to discontinue supporting older versions of IE may seem on the surface more about saving space and focusing on modern browsers, which are of course noble goals in themselves.

The real news here, however, is that with this decision, the jQuery team is clearly positioning the library to be relevant to development scenarios beyond web applications. That's a significant step in jQuery's evolution, and I'd expect to see the jQuery team flesh this out more as these scenarios become more and more prevalent.