This is a welcome change. Considering the market share of IE 6, 7 and 8 is pretty minuscule and Google dropping support for IE8 back in November 2012 should be cause enough to drop it from jQuery too. It's great to hear they'll be supporting the older 1.9 branch for users who need to support older versions of IE as not everyone has the luxury of being able to ditch older versions of IE like that. There's no cause for concern here, the jQuery team covered their bases well and lets face it, there aren't many open source projects out there that drop support for older versions of something like a browser and then commit to continue to support an older branch for a lengthy amount of time.
Statcounter[1] puts IE8 at ~10%, 12% for the US[2]. In some markets it's even lower[3]. This matches what I see from non-tech client websites. For anything related to software, IE as a whole is close to zero.
StatCounter tracks 3 million websites vs 40k for NetMarketShare.
As best I can see on the site you linked, IE8 is 23.23%. That also disagrees significantly with this source: http://caniuse.com/usage_table.php where IE8 is 8.89%
Well one of the websites I'm working on is a fairly big one in germany and only about 4% of all visitors are using IE8 or below. Guess what! We now only support IE9+.
You combined all aforementioned versions of IE together to yield that result: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri... — even combined the market share is still in my opinion minuscule. The only browser with a substantial market share is IE 8 which according to the site has a market share of 23%, it's not even worth adding in those other percentages on-top to try and make it seem as though a lot of people still use those browsers.
31% is not justification enough to maintain legacy code in a library that has become a little bloated over the years because of the backwards compatibility with older browsers. If you want to support that 31%, use the 1.9 branch it's better than the alternative being no support whatsoever.
Edit: Why all of the down-votes, is my response offensive?
Then shouldn't my original comment be the one that gets down-voted which is where I originally said IE's market share is minuscule, not my response to someone else's comment? I standby what I said. Considering Google does not support versions of IE below 9, Google too deems 1/3 of the Internet to be a minuscule proportion of users if they're fine dropping support.
