The much-awaited jQuery 2.0 has arrived, and as expected the new release drops support for older versions of Internet Explorer, including IE 6, 7, and 8. The announcement was done on the official blog of jQuery. Besides eliminating support for older versions of Internet Explorer, jQuery 2.0 did away with all the legacy IE code for node selection, DOM manipulation, event handling and Ajax. But yes, jQuery team still supports the 1.x branch which does run on IE 6/7/8.

Apparently, jQuery is used on over 50 percent of the websites, and developers use it to develop sophisticated, cross-browser web UIs. The new version, jQuery 2.0, developers will be able to reduce the size of the library’s code base by 12 per cent while improving its performance at the same time.

Here are the key changes done in jQuery 2.0:

• No more support for IE 6/7/8
• Reduced size
• Custom builds for even smaller files
• jQuery 1.9 API equivalence

On using the jQuery 2.0, the company said that developers who want to support the oldest versions of IE will also need to use an older version of the jQuery library. There are few environments where the jQuery team will no longer support use of the 1.x line, such as Google Chrome add-ons, Mozilla XUL apps and Firefox extensions, Apple UIWebView class, and others. On future enhancements, the company said,

“In keeping with our pledge to minimize API divergence between the 1.x and 2.x branches, we’ll be releasing a jQuery 1.10 within a couple of months that incorporates the bug fixes and differences reported from both the 1.9 and 2.0 beta cycles. In the future, we will be maintaining feature parity between 1.10 and 2.0, 1.11 and 2.1, etc. Patch releases will happen in each branch on their own schedule, based on team resources and severity of any reported bugs.”

Released on April 18, 2013, jQuery 2.0 is now available for download here.