This flat-out does not make sense. We all may hate IE6, 7, and 8, but a vast number of people still use it, and leaving them out just means alienating an audience and customers. Why do it? Spite?
Because removing all of the special case code paths in jQuery 2.0 will inevitably remove bytes from the library, allow us to use newer browser features with less polyfills, and increase performance for modern browsers. Read the post, we are not "dropping support" - 1.9 is going to be API compatible with 2.0.
