jQuery will drop support for Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 "somewhere in 2015", jQuery Foundation president Dave Methvin stated on the official jQuery blog last week.
Methvin said he was giving the jQuery community "long-lead-notice on changes to browser support" due to Microsoft ending support for Windows XP.
This change will go hand in hand with the release of jQuery 1.13. The release 1.12 will be the last one with official support for the named versions of Microsoft's default browser for Windows.
For release 1.12 the project will accept no further feature requests or bug fixes anymore. Only serious issues concerning IE 6/7 will be fixed by delivering future patch releases. The same applies to Opera 12.1x and Safari 5.1.
Release 1.13 will support IE 8 and later only. This decision will lead to the removal of all older Internet Explorer specific workarounds and patches in jQuery 1.13 and beyond. The official jQuery blog states that those removals will be done "in order to simplify the code base".
When it comes to the definition of support, Methvin references to current testing policies of the jQuery project.
Under the premise that “untested code is broken code,” the jQuery core team prefers to say we fully support a browser if the project regularly runs unit tests against that browser.
[...]
We can only ensure high-quality continuing support for the browsers and environments we constantly unit-test. However, we will try to provide some reasonable level of support to browsers in any popular environment. The highest priority will be on ensuring the browser doesn’t throw errors. Low priority will be put on ensuring that old or rare browsers produce the exact same API results as modern browsers.
jQuery is one of the most popular compatibility and feature abstraction libraries for browser APIs on the internet. Due to its successfull propagation during the mid 2000, it has quickly developed into a quasi standard for web developers. Due to internal policies or internally used applications many companies and enterprises all over the world still stick to the named versions of Internet Explorer.
The developer's community shows appreciation for the decision, made by the jQuery project. Tweets like "@jquery finally! No more IE6 and IE7 support!" - (@bythegram) are no seldom positions. Some people also hope to get rid of IE 8 as well soon. This is what T.J. Crowder states in a users comment to jQuery's announcement.
But I should have trusted you guys better than that. Nice one!
Maybe next year or the year after, we’ll be able to waive bye-bye to IE8 as well. Maybe.