Fronted framework suggestion: Mithril
Mithril is a light (8Kb mingzipped) vdom/component based library that comes with a router and a XHR wrapper. v1.0 works on IE9+.
It is fairly popular (7K GitHub stars), its documentation is comprehensive and its community is lively and responsive.
Disclaimer: I'm a core contributor, which makes me biased obviously, but hopefully the above is enough to convince you.