AngularJS 1.3 or AngularJS 1.2.x

What are the advantages of using a 1.3 version of AngularJS framework in contrast to the 1.2.x branch?

I've read that in the 1.3.x releases the support for Internet Explorer 8 will be dropped. So I'd like to know whether the features/capabilities of 1.3 version are so tempting that one might accept the lack of support to IE 8. Are only the new features going not to work in IE 8, or the existing (in 1.2.x releases) ones too? Are there any patches that enable the use of AngularJS 1.3 in IE 8?

EDIT: IE 8 is not my only concern. I would like to know what 1.3 version has that 1.2 hasn't any why is it more powerful.

Edit after 1.3 official release:

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Here is the announcement for the 1.3 release.
http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2014/10/angularjs-130-superluminal-nudge.html<br> It highlights new features such as One-time bindings syntax, ngAria, ngMessages, ngModelOptions, strict DI and performance improvements.

There is also a migration doc to help with your upgrade
https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/migration#migrating-from-1-2-to-1-3

If your question is now "is it worth upgrading to 1.3 considering the massive changes planned for 2.0?", I'd say the answer is definitely yes.

Orig answer:

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Since you're not asking about upgrading, I'm assuming you're just starting development. If this is true, there's a really good chance that 1.3 (or higher) will be the release version by the time you go live. So don't hesitate based on it being in beta. Your code will be far less stable than the 1.3 branch :)

Also, they aren't purposefully breaking things in IE8, they are just done testing that things still work in it. If you have a really strong business requirement for supporting IE8, then stick with 1.2. But even then, SPAs just really suck in IE8 considering all the UI fanciness that is usually required to make them usable.

Biggest reason to use 1.3 though is to avoid writing a bunch of code now that is for sure dependent on things that are already known to be a breaking change (because they have already changed).

To answer your edit, there's nothing really notable or significantly new...

> http://blog.angularjs.org/2013/12/angularjs-13-new-release-approaches.html > > 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.

Edit 8/4/14: It looks like they have decided to add something very significant to 1.3...

> https://docs.google.com/document/d/150lerb1LmNLuau_a_EznPV1I1UHMTbEl61t4hZ7ZpS0/edit > July 28, 2014
> Decided that we’ll back-port the AngularJS 2.0 Router to > 1.3 in support of Material Design components.

The benefits and design for the new router planned for 2.0 (and for 1.3 it now seems) is outlined here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I3UC0RrgCh9CKrLxeE4sxwmNSBl3oSXQGt9g3KZnTJI/edit (in which they also have mentioned backporting to 1.x)

I upgraded to 1.3 beta-11 and tried to make it still work in ie8 with polyfills and decorators but it was to many core function that could not be fixed externally. and it failed the most simplest page. They don't just stop testing IE8. They are starting to remove IE8 hacks too.

So i decided to screw IE8 completely, cuz 1.3 is more awesome (Changelog)

1.2.x is always going to be compatible with ie8 and 1.3.x is only for ie => 9

Angular 1.3 is still in beta, so you shouldn't be using it yet for a production app. Here's the blog post where the Angular team explains what's coming in 1.3: http://blog.angularjs.org/2013/12/angularjs-13-new-release-approaches.html.

I don't think they are dropping support as such, just not testing that features work in IE8. So things may still work but it's on you to test the features you are using work in unsupported browsers (and fix if it doesn't)