- jQuery 1.9 (early 2013): many of the interfaces already deprecated in version 1.8 will be removed; some of them will be available as plugins or alternative APIs supported by the jQuery project. IE 6/7/8 will be supported as today.
- jQuery 1.9.x (ongoing in 2013 and beyond): This version will continue to get fixes for any regressions, new browser bugs, etc.
- jQuery 2.0 (early 2013, not long after 1.9): This version will support the same APIs as jQuery 1.9 does, but removes support for IE 6/7/8 oddities such as borked event model, IE7 “attropertiesâ€, HTML5 shims, etc.
From the road map above, we can find one big change of jQuery, the jQuery 2.0 will drop support for some IE6/7/8 oddities. jQuery website says the goal is for 1.9 and 2.0 to be interchangeable as far as the API set they support. You can change between 1.9 and 2.0. If you need IE6/7/8 support, you should choose jQuery 1.9, otherwise, you should choose jQuery 2.0.You can use following code to achieve this.
<script src="jquery-1.9.0.js"></script>
<![endif]- ->
<!--[if gte IE 9]><!- ->
<script src="jquery-2.0.0.js"><</script>
<!--<![endif]- ->
We are not sure whether jQuery will finally drop all support for IE6/7/8. If jQuery 2.0 is released at the beginning of 2013 as it says and there are still many IE6/7/8 users, poeple may choose not to upgrade it. According to StateCounter, the market share of IE7 and IE8 are 1.53% and 14.35% as of May 2012. This means that it's not a good time to drop support for IE6/7/8 now. But after half a year, this may change.
For the details you c!n check the jQuery official blog: http://blog.jquery.com/2012/06/28/jquery-core-version-1-9-and-beyond/
Reference : http://www.oschina.net/news/30535/jquery-core-version-1-9-and-beyond