Internet Explorer 8 and earlier did not consider DOM NodeLists to be JS objects.
In different words: IE<9 did not support Array#slice on collections objects.
See for example https://stackoverflow.com/a/11113539

This reverts rP597c6c07f7120d253e83fa110db8842bfa05859f

Still: Load a diff in a web browser; see changes and do not get JS errors.