

The State of jQuery 2013 - dmethvin
http://blog.jquery.com/2013/01/14/the-state-of-jquery-2013/

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alxndr
"jQuery 2.0 now has more patches and shims for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox
than for Internet Explorer!"

Interesting.

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fourstar
Well if you consider that the support for IE6-IE8 is dropped, it's pretty
realistic.

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alxndr
I suppose it's three browsers vs one...

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eranation
> "The most exciting news of all? The Plugin site returns!"

Indeed!

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wyuenho
I for one would love to see the plugin site stay down. There are just way too
many terribly written and inflexible plugins around that are mostly
reinventions of other terribly written and inflexible plugins. The people in
the jQuery ecosystem really need to learn some proper OOP. At the very least,
you should be able to do what the Bootstrap's jQuery plugins do - write your
own UI class, wrap it around with the jQuery plugin namespace, and send a
custom event for every action the class takes. No more stupid callbacks.

Having the plugin site down the past year had been a breath of fresh air. I've
discovered a dozen or so truly great plugins purely by world of mouth. I can't
tell you how much better this filter is than the searching and rating and
commenting stuff on the old plugin site.

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fourstar
If you are so against the plugins that are there (when they come back),
consider contributing some better ones. It doesn't make any sense for an open-
source project to _not_ exist simply because you personally don't like the way
the code is being written.

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wyuenho
Oh you have over-estimated my power to make terrible jQuery plugins disappear.
Terrible they may be, they certainly have a right to exist, they just should
crowd out the really good ones on an official plugin site.

I have given up on writing jQuery plugins. Something about calling "methods"
on the plugin by using a string isn't resonating with me. But since you've
asked, I recently have open sourced 2 backbone projects on Github. One has
reached 1.0 tho I just discovered a few bugs, another one is coming along with
a first release soon.

<https://github.com/wyuenho/backbone-pageable>

<https://github.com/wyuenho/backgrid>

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tambourine_man
Much has been said that 2.0 dropping IE8 was about code size. I really hope it
was a focusing effort rather than size reduction decision.

jQuery minified is ~90K. Even if 2.0 weights half as much, 45K isn't that big
a deal, even on mobile. Besides, it's so widely used that if you link to
Google's CDN, it's probably cached already.

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currysausage
First, I believe that "every millisecond counts" is a good principle in web
design. There is enough latency that we can't avoid, which is why we should
avoid latency wherever it is possible. Considering this, 45K is a big deal
indeed.

Second, just some hours ago, I read that the mere execution (not the
download!) of jQuery takes about a second on an iPhone 3G. These devices and
similarly weak ones are still out there, which is easy to forget if you test
only on the latest hardware.

Lastly, keep in mind that bandwidth isn't always ideal. Consider mobile: In
rural areas, 3G isn't always available. When I'm on the train, loading the
slim HN itself often is not an issue, while many other pages simply time out.
In developing countries, bandwidths are often very low, too. 56kbps still is a
realistic bandwidth. And downloading 45K on a 56kbps connection takes almost
7s.

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tambourine_man
Every millisecond does count. But design is about compromise. By that logic we
shouldn't use CSS at all, but we choose to pay the price of a few KBs for the
returned value.

I'm all for efficiency, I'll use Zepto or a focused custom made solutions
whenever I can, I'll squeeze every byte out of the images, serve resolution
specific versions, gzip, etc.

But there are some compromises that I'm not willing to make. Take images for
example. If I can see image quality degradation on something that I find
important, I won't compress it further, even if it's huge. Add a few iPad
retina display PNGs and suddenly 45KB seems like small change. Sometimes I'd
rather have the user wait for a great result than deliver a poor one fast.

In the case of jQuery 2.0, dropping IE8 support seems a poor and premature
kind of optimization. If your target is a memory starved 128MB iPhone 3G on
Edge, than 45K for a single JS library is still way too much. Not only it
would take forever to load and run, but unresponsiveness and eventual crashing
would still be a problem.

I think the effort would be better spent on improving jQuery mobile. People on
56kbps connections could be running even older versions of IE.

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codeka
There's also a difference when you're developing your own site compared to
when you're developing a framework or library. If your library is used on more
than half of the top 100,000 websites (as jQuery is) then a 45KB saving or a
100ms speed boost, 50,000 times over is a big deal.

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numbnuts
I understand why they'd drop IE8 support in 2.0 but it's still a bitter pill
to swallow.

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pdwetz
If you're primarily focused on older IE's, I think it's assumed you're dealing
with a forced intranet environment (typically government/military/large corp)
and/or need to focus on stability, not the latest and greatest. Part of me
says "good riddance" as I never got the lock in to XP, but I get why devs
might be annoyed with being stuck at 1.9 for the foreseeable future.

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zalambar
We're not going to be "stuck" with 1.9. Use 2.0 for a smaller and faster
library on modern browsers and 1.9 to continue to support old IE versions.

[http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core-
version-1-9-an...](http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core-
version-1-9-and-beyond/) "Our goal is for 1.9 and 2.0 to be interchangeable as
far as the API set they support. When 2.0 comes out, your decision on which
version to choose should be as simple as this: If you need IE 6/7/8 support,
choose 1.9; otherwise you can use either 1.9 or 2.0. ... If your web site
needs oldIE support, and we expect most sites will need it for at least
another year or two, you can use IE conditional comments to include version
1.9 only when visitors are using oldIE:"

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ajanuary
I'm wondering if they should have give. jQuery 2.0 a separate name to make it
clear development on jQuery 1.9 will continue in parallel.

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bloggersway
Thanks bro for sharing.

