jQuery 2.0 has just been released and completely dropped support for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 [more...]. Currently [April 2013] the 1.9.x branch is still maintained, and probably will receive some improvements and bugfixes [1.10 will come!], but sure not for long. jQuery announced that it is possible to use 2.0 and 1.9 on the same page, but sooner or later this branch will be dropped.
With a global market share of 6-7% [more...], in some countries even 50% (China etc. [more...]), the IE8/7/6 group is still a big thing on the web, and a lot of huge old-school companies still use them in-house, with no plans to update. The reality is: Even in 2015 there will be an economically significant amount of IE6/7/8 users [according to burndown calculations]. And the often-heard argument "Let's drop those users" is not a good one, in a professional corporate environment no sales person would ever agree to this, not even if the percentage of users is 0.5%! It's a pity, but IE8/7 will still be important to a lot of frontend developers in 2013, 2014 and 2015, for people mainly working with clients from asia etc. probably even longer (!).
So my question is: Is there an official statement that shows the long-term-service roadmap for the jQuery 1.x branch ?
Note: I asked the offical jQuery team, but haven't got an answer yet.
There does not yet appear to be an official statement showing the long-term-service roadmap, but there has been a promise that it will not be dropped anytime soon. According to their official statement:
"The jQuery team will continue to support both the jQuery 1.x and 2.x lines simultaneously for as long as those older versions of IE are still a factor... We fully expect that most Internet web sites may continue to use jQuery 1.x for quite a while, as long as older versions of IE still comprise a large proportion of web surfers. And so the jQuery team will also continue to support both the jQuery 1.x and 2.x lines"