AngularJS 1.3: a new release approaches

Heads up! A new Angular release is on its way. Since we plan to discontinues support for old browsers, we wanted to give you plenty of notice. As a secondary goal, this release will cover features to improve performance, and small API fixes that require small breaking changes and removal of apis that were previously deprecated. We're also making a change to how we number stable/unstable releases.

AngularJS 1.3 discontinues support for Internet Explorer 8

Why we're doing this:

• Modern browsers have evolved. Although our stats tell us that only a small percentage of users are on Internet Explorer 8, maintaining compatibility requires code that slows the rest of AngularJS down.
• In April 2014, Microsoft will be ending support for Windows XP, which means the end of support for the operating system most of Internet Explorer 8 users use.

Dropping support for Internet Explorer 8  will enable us to add more exciting features to Angular faster, decrease Angular's support burden, and cut our build time in half, while affecting only a very small proportion of users.

But what if your users still rely heavily on Internet Explorer 8? If your app needs to keep supporting older browsers, you have a few options:

• Keep using Angular 1.2.x.
• Use 1.3 and test (or if you're feeling lucky, hope for the best). The changes in version 1.3 won't be actively removing the hacks in Angular that make Internet Explorer 8 work. Most things that work now will probably keep working. But we're going to stop testing against Internet Explorer 8 in our CI server configuration. And we won't be fixing issues that are solely related to support for Internet Explorer 8 users.
• Look for commercial support outside the core project - the Angular ecosystem is now big enough that it wouldn't be shocking to us if a company started offering commercial support for Angular apps on IE8. (entrepreneurs: hint hint!)

Removal of deprecated apis

We are aiming at the promise unwrapping in Angular templates that we deprecated before v1.2.

New naming conventions for release versions

Since our long term goal is to move to semantic versioning (semver) for Angular 2.0, starting with AngularJS 1.3 we are replacing odd/even versioning we used previously with semver's pre-release notation.

What does that mean?

• The first stable release under the 1.3.x release train will be 1.3.0.
• Unstable releases toward 1.3.0 will use semver's pre-release notation (#.#.#-text.#) So, for example, 1.3.0-beta.1 and 1.3.0-beta.2 would be unstable releases.

New features for 1.3? Tell us what you care about.

We have a handful of things that we want to add, but we also want to hear from you! Since there is no good way to create a poll on GitHub, we are going to abuse GitHub a bit — if you care about a particular Issue or PR please post a comment with text "+1" on it. When the poll closes Mary Poppins will count the votes casted during the duration of the poll, *de-dupe* them and count them. (She'll then delete the vote comments and replace them with a summary comment.) The poll will close on January 2 and we'll use the results when deciding what to add to the 1.3 release.

OK. But when is Angular 1.3 actually coming?

We still have a few things lined up for the 1.2.x release train, and we want time to consider your votes. In spite of that you should see the first beta builds of 1.3.0 starting to roll out in January with the usual 1-2 week frequency.