Timmy Willison We recently announced the beta release of jQuery 4.0. The new version of jQuery is a major release with many bug fixes, performance improvements, and some breaking changes. Browsers below IE 11 are no longer supported and many APIs have been removed. jQuery adjusts the order of focus events to match the browser order, which is currently supported. FormData.
Willison explained the rationale behind the major release:
We expect disruption to be minimal…many of the breaking changes are ones that teams have wanted to make for years but weren’t able to make it through patches or minor releases. Trimmed the legacy code, removed some previously deprecated APIs, removed some internal-only parameters in public functions that were undocumented, and fixed some overly complex parameters. Removed support for “magic” behavior.
jQuery 4.0 ends support for browsers below IE 11 and earlier, including Edge Legacy, iOS below 11, Firefox below 65, and Android browsers. jQuery 5.0 will remove support for IE11.
jQuery 4.0 removes several APIs that were already deprecated in previous releases, e.g. cssNumber, cssProps, isArray, isFunction, isWindow, isWindow, isNumeric, parseJSON, nodeName, trim). Internal use API push, sortand splice Deprecated in favor of methods available on the JavaScript Array prototype.
Featured events focusin, focusout, focusand blur Events are now triggered in the same order as in the latest versions of modern browsers. All browsers except IE follow the current W3C specifications. (Updated in 2023), which specifies the order of the following events: Blur, focus out, concentration, concentrate.
jQuery 5.0 expects the following Explore event design further. jQuery.ajax Adds support for binary data. FormData.
Although jQuery was first released 17 years ago in 2006, it remains a perennial feature in the web environment. According to npm trends, the number of library downloads continues to increase on average.
1 Reddit user Welcome new release:
I’m a WordPress developer so I really appreciate new updates. I think this is the first major release in the last eight years.
Although developers can use the library directly in their web pages, jQuery is also a dependency of many other libraries and tools, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Cypress. Therefore, part of the increase in jQuery npm downloads may be explained by the increased popularity of related dependent packages.as Reddit user comments:
Cypress and Expose jQuery.
Developers are recommended to: Check release notesThis includes a complete list of related breaking changes, improvements, and bug fixes.
