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jQuery 1.2 and IE 5

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 2:51 pm
by JellyFish
...I'm a bit shocked. jQuery 1.2 doesn't support IE 5? This is sad. According to W3, 1.5% of users on the internet us IE 5, just as much Opera users. If their are 1 billion people on the net, that 1.5% is 15 million. That's a lot of people, not as much as the other 985 billion but still a lot.

Is jQuery doing the right thing in doing this? What browsers does prototype support? Apparently, mootools is doing the same thing, but I couldn't find any support information about prototype at prototypejs.org.

What's the explanation?

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 3:14 pm
by onion2k
According to W3, 1.5% of users on the internet us IE 5, just as much Opera users.
On the biggest site I maintain we had a little under 2 million page views last month and 0 visitors using IE5.

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 3:54 pm
by Kieran Huggins
There is absolutely nothing preventing an IE 5 user from using a newer browser. In fact, even Microsoft strongly suggests upgrading for security reasons, and there's an upgrade path to at least IE 6 in just about every case.

Besides, jQuery promotes "progressive enhancement" - a technique that guarantees at least a functional experience for the end user regardless of javascript availability. This includes situations where the library is unsupported (IE <= 5, Netscape <= 4), or not loaded at all (spiders, screen readers, text-only browsers).

Dropping IE 5 support was a good move, IMO.

Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 9:22 am
by anjanesh
Kieran Huggins wrote:In fact, even Microsoft strongly suggests upgrading for security reasons, and there's an upgrade path to at least IE 6 in just about every case.
Just recently, Microsoft has removed the genuine Windows validation check for IE7 installation inorder for *everyone* to to be able to install IE7.

Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 10:55 am
by JayBird
Kieran Huggins wrote:There is absolutely nothing preventing an IE 5 user from using a newer browser. In fact, even Microsoft strongly suggests upgrading for security reasons, and there's an upgrade path to at least IE 6 in just about every case.

Besides, jQuery promotes "progressive enhancement" - a technique that guarantees at least a functional experience for the end user regardless of javascript availability. This includes situations where the library is unsupported (IE <= 5, Netscape <= 4), or not loaded at all (spiders, screen readers, text-only browsers).

Dropping IE 5 support was a good move, IMO.
Yep, i'll echo that. My biggest site had no views from IE5.