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For as awesome and popular as jQuery is, why is jQuery UI so buggy and poorly maintained? Frustrated

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by gentlemedia

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A few practical notes that build on points raised here by , and .

The situation described — useful, widely adopted core library with a smaller, slower-moving UI layer — is common. When a project ends up as "a handful of widgets" maintained by a small team, fixes can take longer and compatibility drift can happen. That explains the frustration without assigning blame.

Concrete options and trade-offs:

  • Audit the surface area in use (list every jQuery UI widget and theme actually loaded). Smaller surface = easier to control.
  • Bundle only what’s needed or vendor the single widget in question (autocomplete). Vendoring avoids upstream breaks but creates an internal maintenance responsibility: add tests, document any patches, and track upstream for important fixes.
  • Replace single widgets with focused alternatives or lightweight native approaches (for example, HTML5 form features or a small standalone autocomplete) when feature needs are limited.
  • If staying with jQuery UI, invest in reproducible bug reports: a minimal test case, browser versions, expected vs actual behavior. Well-formed reports make fixes likelier and help maintainers or contributors accept patches.
  • For teams willing to contribute: fork, add tests, and submit small PRs; community patches that include tests are the fastest route to improving a project’s health.

A short checklist to act on:

  1. Inventory widgets in use.
  2. Decide: vendor, replace, or keep.
  3. Add automated tests and CI for any vendored or patched widget.
  4. File clear, minimal issues or PRs upstream.
  5. Plan a migration path if long-term dependency on jQuery UI is undesirable.

Given ’s note that only autocomplete is used, the least-cost path is usually to extract or replace that single widget and add tests; that fixes immediate pain while preserving the option to migrate later.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

I hear that and decided to head to https://jqueryui.com/ to read why this is. Right there, at the top is a great reason why it's the way it is.

jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library.

I don't know what you read into that but to me this means that many contributed and may be nothing more than a collection of things folk have written over the years.

Now I can't guess if you are using one of the items there or buidling your own jQuery item. I see they do have a bug report system but my bet is it's for jQuery and not something that someone contributed.

https://bugs.jqueryui.com/ticketgraph didn't inspire confidence as ticket counts appear to be rising over time.

Member Avatar for gentlemedia

I also thiink jQueryUI is dying slowly. If you want to rely on third party integrations then better go to a payed alternative such as KendoUI or even the free . It looks like the latter has still an active userbase, update cycle and support.

Member Avatar for Dani

rproffitt, that's my point exactly. jQueryUI is buggy and not well maintained. However, it's wholly owned by jQuery Foundation, and they don't put their name on much. If they choose to be associated with this plugin library and none others, why not make sure it represents them well?

Thinking back, jQuery in the very beginning used to have a plugins directory. I think jQuery UI might have started as a curated collection of some of the best plugins from the directory, when the directory was removed because it was unmaintainable.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

. That's sad. You write they dumped the curated content and didn't update the top page to reflect the move away from curation.

Ouch. The worst find was that bug or ticket count. It is rising, not falling. Time to reach out to them directly about this or file your bug report. I didn't know about Dojo so this was nice to read about alternatives.

Member Avatar for Dani

Time to reach out to them directly about this or file your bug report.

I actually used to use jQuery UI quite a bit a long while ago, but now the only thing I use it for is the autocomplete dropdown (which powers our search, etc.)

It just strikes me as unmaintained and overall buggy, and I'm not really too inclined to submit a bug report since I highly doubt it will be fixed up in a jiffy. ... Which is all perfectly fine except that it strikes me as odd that it's also the only plugin library I know of owned by the jQuery Foundation, and the only one they officially put their name behind. For how insanely popular jQuery is, I'm surprised.

Member Avatar for Dani

Gentlemedia,

Do you think jQuery is dying or just jQueryUI?

Member Avatar for rproffitt

Here's my thought on dying, etc.

  1. https://github.com/jquery/jquery/graphs/contributors gives me a snapshot of develments of jQuery. It looks like a mature system. The open bugs at another page is only 69 with many being marked as need more info and other states.

This is in sharp contrast to jQueryUI's 1200 plus open bug count and the upward trend. This is a sign of the developers either not bearing down on the bugs or closing those that are Roseannadanna 's.

  1. The attraction is there for jQueryUI so dying isn't what I'd call it. Just a project in need of some fresh blood.
Member Avatar for gentlemedia

I meant jQueryUI and ok... dying is a big word, but since the rise of Bootstrap and the likes that also come with JavaScript widgets, I believe the popularity of it is quite low compared to how it was. And there're so many other alternatives as well.

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