jQuery has been around for a long time, since around 6 years now. It came about at a time when IE was the dominant player in the market, Firefox had a growing share, and Chrome wasn’t a blip on the browser statistics — it wasn’t out yet. Today Internet Explorer has a decreasing share, Chrome is the leading browser with Firefox right behind.
Now jQuery is about to reach v1.8, and there are a number of “insecure, inefficient, ineffective, and inadvisable features” that the developers of jQuery wish to remove. With jQuery used by as many sites as it is, this is not as simple a task as one might think.
In jQuery 1.8, coming in a month, a number of jQuery APIs will be depreciated. In jQuery 1.9 they will be removed, with some of them being offered at plug-ins. This version of jQuery will support Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 as usual, and will come in early 2013.
Internet Explorer has long been the sore spot for many web developers, and has been a major burden when it comes to cross-browser frameworks. As such with the upcoming jQuery 2.0, which will come shortly after jQuery 1.9, support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 will be removed. In all other respects the goal is for it to be entirely compatible with jQuery 1.9 and a drop-in replacement. The advantage of jQuery 2.0 then is to have better performance than 1.9 since a lot of the code just for IE compatibility will have been dropped.
It is important to note here only support for older versions of IE 6, 7, and 8 is being dropped, IE 9 and 10 will of course be supported. Also in a break in tradition jQuery 1.9 will continue to be supported long after jQuery 2.0 is out.
You can find out more at the jQuery blog.
