Why I not looking forward to JavaScript 2.0

Ah, it is a Friday after a long week of work and I see the three day weekend in my grasp. I think it is a good time to rant since it is hot and humid in the DC area tonight and a hot topic is buring in my mind. I been hearing about all this hype around JavaScript 2.0. People are seeing the spec being revived after sitting dormant for years. Well with the popularity of Ajax, the dust has been blown off it and maybe it will see life. I wondering if people will ever agree on what it should contain. Ah, that is a different rant.

Now FireFox just released new version of JavaScript labeled as 1.7. As I sit here I wonder why would anyone care. Who in their right mind codes for just FireFox. Well if you are a person that does not care about market share you can use it. Or you have to code all of the functionality yourself as prototypes and such.

Why am I so anti 2.0? Well I would personally love to see it so I have a little more control over my application, but would we be able to use it? Right now I can look at my server logs and see plenty of people using Windows 98 and IE 5.0 still. Luckily I do not see many NN4 logs. lol. I laugh when people have to support that. Again another rant.

Now with IE 7, it only supports XP and greater. That means we are going to see IE6 for a long time. Now people are saying well get FireFox. I know people that live in the boonies and they are stuck on the world's slowest dial up. That means what their computer came with is what they will use. They can not afford to sit and wait to download a browser. Heck, this computer geek and author of 2 tech books was on dial up until last month! (Moved to FiOS, just a little faster..just a little bit...lol..)

Plus there are other parts of the world that have crappy connections and can not afford to upgrade their computers to newer versions. Heck, MS new OS's specs are out the roof from what I have read. So we are stuck with older browsers and older OS's. I still know people that swear about using NT.

Now since JavaScript is not a plug-in like Flash, we are stuck with what that browser comes with. No more new version upgrade notice. It is so easy for us on a server environment to upgrade to the best, but we have no way to force all of the user's to go to the best, newest, and greatest. I know tons of people that do not have FF1.5 since they are happy with their version. It really is in a person's nature to stick with what is familiar to them. I remember trying to get people to use FireFox and not AOL's browser. They could not do it since it was foreign territory. It did not have what they needed. (It did, it was just in a different place.)

Lets forget about computers for a second and look at cars. You have some people that buy a brand new car and trade it in when it gets 30K. You have other people that buy a car and mod it so instead of it being a rust bucket, it is a rust bucket with nzce rims and moves from vibrations of the sub. You have other people that buy a car and keep it well maintained. And then you have people that have a piece of junk that spews smoke and you just wonder how in the world it is still running.

Now same thing can be applied to computers. Some people buy a new computer when they think it is bad. Others keep upgrading components. Others just make sure they keep up to date with patches and virus scans. And then you just have those computers full of spyware and virus and you just wonder how it gets online and does not dial some foreign country to download porn.

Now I am way off my original topic, I think I should just sum everything up and get back to watching the back of my eyelids. JavaScript 2.0 is something we need, but it is something we will not be able to use. If we use it, we will be coding 2 versions of everything if you want to support everyone and use the newest technology. (Unless some true nerd codes a conversion program!) Or we can stick with what we have and just deal with the quirks and let the browsers fix those before introducing a big quirk.

Eric Pascarello
Coauthor of Ajax In Action
Moderator of HTML/JavaScript at www.JavaRanch.com
Author of: JavaScript: Your Visual Blueprint for Dynamic Web Pages