Board Thread:Watercooler/@comment-27393108-20160105154547/@comment-11733175-20160107194752

Dessamator wrote: Also wikia uses jQuery 1.x because mediawiki comes built in with that support and some extensions or core features may require that old version, so it might require considerable work to port it to the newer version.

Anyway, WMF seems to have recently dropped javascript support for IE8 (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118303) so it is possible that Wikia may follow soon. It's not strictly true that Wikia use the default jQuery version, at one point in the past monobook and oasis used different versions of jQuery. I imagine Oasis was rolled out with the latest version and monobook was brought in line some time later. MediaWiki 1.19 actually comes with jQuery 1.7.1 while Wikia currently uses 1.8.2.

To answer the question about using jQuery 2+, I don't know for sure, but I don't think 2 existed back then. However, 2.1.1 was used to build venus so it's not a case of looking to support older browsers, more that it's often a pain to upgrade external libraries on a large site.

As I mentioned above, Wikia dropped support for IE8 years ago. They have a policy of not officially supporting any browser that has less than 10% usage across their sites, and that happened long ago. Wikimedia on the other hand support browsers up until their end of life as decided by the developers that maintain them. IE6 had support dropped only last year iirc. However, lack of support as far as Wikimedia are concerned means not loading JS in those browsers, not simply not caring what happens in those browsers. They still ensure the site works without JS via graceful fallbacks implemented with CSS/HTML. Wikia on the other hand don't test in those browsers at all afaik and typically don't accept bug reports for them unless there's significant issue taken to a bug by the community, such as the global nav wrapping onto another 'line' on older versions of Firefox.