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Comment by everettForth | Hacker News Reader

For those who aren't aware, IE8 doesn't support ECMAscript 5, which includes useful functions, such as: Array.prototype.map and Object.keys. The alternative to this is to use something like jquery's implementation of map.

Anyway, this is why IE8 in particular is a cutoff for compatibility. A lot of startups are not building their sites to be compatible with IE8.

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Unfortunately, Android 2.3 is not fully ES5 compatible either. Since that's about one-third of all Android I doubt that ES5 compat was the driving force for this move. More likely it was the non-W3C event model and general non-use of IE8 for the reporting interface.

Android users ought to just avoid the Android browser and use Chrome or Dolphin. I don't even understand why there is an Android browser. Android browser also has trouble with updating SSL cert authority information, and it's got issues with its touch implementation.

I think it predated Chrome.

I figured it existed so device manufacturers and wireless providers would have something to crap all over, which wasn't Chrome.

Android users on Android 2.3 can't use Chrome and Dolphin uses the native browser engine. I think Firefox Mobile would be your only option, but the performance has to be awful.

Dolphin switched to its own browser engine, at least on Android.

http://dolphin.com/dolphin-browser-is-the-fastest-html5-mobi...

For many products, Google only supports the two most recent browsers versions for a given browser. IE11 will be out next month, so they should be dropping IE9 support too.

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33864

It's probably just a matter of cost to support that much legacy.

As far as legacy Android, 2.3 usage will probably drop like a rock over the next two years. A 3-4 year old cell phone is going to be really out of date.

Why not just use underscore.js then? It uses Array.prototype.map for _.map if present and fallback to its own implementation otherwise.

It is far from the only example (my favorite is the lack of XHTML support).

> lack of XHTML support

I believed IE8 reads XHTML just fine — are you referring to its inability to handle HTML content delivered with an `application/xml+xhtml` Content-Type header (IIRC)?

Yes.

So javascript is getting built in support for map() before java gets it? :(

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