I personally built a single page application about 2 years ago that worked in IE8, thanks to jQuery and the ecosystem of the time. jQuery, jQuery UI, various plugins incl. jsTree & DataTables.
It flew in Chrome, Firefox and Opera, even then. In IE8 it was slow as hell. Event listeners were slow, ajax and parsing JSON was slow. Everything was crazy slow. The app felt lumpy and awful. And when I hit bugs, the developer tools just were not there.
I would never do this again.
I'd wager that for IE < 8, for any non-trivial app, round-tripping to the server will give you a better UX than using JavaScript.
I personally built a single page application about 2 years ago that worked in IE8, thanks to jQuery and the ecosystem of the time. jQuery, jQuery UI, various plugins incl. jsTree & DataTables.
It flew in Chrome, Firefox and Opera, even then. In IE8 it was slow as hell. Event listeners were slow, ajax and parsing JSON was slow. Everything was crazy slow. The app felt lumpy and awful. And when I hit bugs, the developer tools just were not there.
I would never do this again.
I'd wager that for IE < 8, for any non-trivial app, round-tripping to the server will give you a better UX than using JavaScript.
Deliver something usable for oldIE. There are many people that share this view. I suggest watching this talk on how the BBC deals with legacy browsers (9m 20s): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfvMQ316hMU&t=00h09m20s