Does Ember.js support IE6?

Question

I saw in a question thread that Ember plans to support anything testable with BrowserStack. While the Seven JS Framework blog post, it is mentioned that Ember does not plan to support lower than IE8.
Obviously, I do understand stuff like pushState is not supported by IE6, hence no routing available and such. But I hope most of the essential features are available, e.g. indexOf are not used for array walk and such.

Angela

Answer 1

Thankfully none of the applications I've created using Ember have required anything below IE8 support. There are still a handful of outstanding issues when it comes to IE8, which is definitely a concern for IE8 and below, but it's something I know the whole community are working on as we approach Ember 1.0.

I think the greatest downside to having to support IE6 in an Ember application are the performance issues. Whilst these will be ameliorated with each and every version, there will still be a significant lacuna between IE6 and something like Chrome 22.0. Even IE7 makes a considerable leap in performance.

Furthermore, when testing in IE8 I often get the dreaded "Unresponsive Script" dialog, and so you need to break up large JavaScript loops to post back to the browser. Failing to do so causes IE8 and below to mither you with the dialog box. Fortunately in IE9 they've made this dialog box less pedantic.

If we keep going, we'll find that jQuery announced last year that jQuery 2.0 will be the first version of jQuery to drop support for IE6, IE7, and IE8. Since Ember requires jQuery, and presumably Ember will evolve with jQuery, then long-lasting support for even IE8 might be brought into question. Whilst there are tricks, as mentioned in that document, to load older versions of jQuery depending on the IE version, Ember might also follow suit of dropping support for IE8 and below.

All in all, and with my experience with Ember and IE8, when developing with IE6 and Ember, you might come across a whole host of inexplicable quirks.

Does Ember support IE6? In parts. Is it usable? I doubt it. What is the future for IE6/IE7 and Ember? Bleak.