Comment by colemorrison | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colemorrison | Hacker News Reader

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So I find that the majority of people are missing a very LARGE improvement that I value far beyond any of the stated benefits by the jQuery team:

-One of the most popular libraries is dropping support for IE 6,7, and 8. Thus, yet another cornerstone of the web is going to push users forward and increase the chance that those miserable browsers will disappear.

The most disturbing thing I find is that there are developers that are DEFENDING existence for those older browsers. Are you masochists? Do you enjoy the headaches of fucking around with those??

"Oh but so many clients are still using them, and it writes off potential users!"

How can we ever expect for them to upgrade their damn browser unless the builders the web (developers, not just browsers) quit allowing them to rot in complacency????

Of course, there is a thing as going "too leading edge" and expecting "too much" from the user...but when the cornerstones (libs, browsers, etc) start pushing them forward - then we should embrace this change. Coding for the multi-browser/platform/device/version web is hard enough.

I don't get this line of thinking. Do you know there are programs written on system/36 machines from the early eighties still in production today on ibm iSeries machines? And even older software/systems in place that are older then that. Business requirements don't change hourly/weekly/monthly. If the business requirement that existed at that point in time, that the software solution put in place at that time met those requirements why would a business be compelled to change if those requirements have not changed and the solution met those needs? I've been a developer a really long time, 25+ years professionally. Businesses demand stability, this absolutely absurd idea that software that is only a few years old must be thrown out and some new flashy unproven shit put in its place is mind boggling. The last job I put a bid on, one of the requirements was that the software in initial form be supported for a minimum of 10 years. And in my experience that is a short life span.

The main problem I see is that IE9 does not work on windows XP. How long will we continue to see Windows XP machines in the wild?

Microsoft will not be doing it past 2014. I wouldn't care more about their OS than they do, particularly given the extreme security risks.

Not defending, but if you cannot degrade your functionality to make it work in old IE then you doing something wrong. Please, give me a use-case that is not too niche but absolutely requires the latest generation of browsers.

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