Just as the topic title suggests, any jQuery 4 beta users out there who could let me know what it's like?
The wait for v4 gold release is killing me. Also, please don't make fun of me for being a jQuery user. DaniWeb has been built on jQuery for decades. (Okay, maybe that's not something to brag about.)
Hey, no judgment here — if it works, it works! 😄
I’ve been testing out the jQuery 4 beta on a couple of legacy projects and so far, it’s been pretty smooth. The devs have done a solid job keeping backward compatibility in mind while modernizing under the hood.
Here are a few things I've noticed:
Performance feels snappier in general, especially when chaining a bunch of DOM manipulations.
They’ve removed deprecated methods like .size() and .bind(), so if you're upgrading, you’ll want to double-check your codebase for those.
The codebase is now fully ES Module-compatible, which is a nice step toward playing well with modern tooling.
Better integration with modern browsers and drop of IE support (finally!) — this has let the team clean up a lot of cruft.
Some improvements in the build system and custom builds if you only need parts of jQuery.
Overall, it’s been a pretty painless upgrade as long as you aren’t relying on any ancient plugins or patterns. If DaniWeb is still going strong with jQuery, no shame in sticking with what works — especially with a major version refresh like this one on the horizon!
Fingers crossed for a stable release soon 🤞
Why would anyone be hesitant to admit to using jQuery? At the time it was released, it sparked fundamental upgrades to JavaScript.
JQuery was popular when we first started using it. Nowadays, there are much more elegant JavaScript frameworks, and native JavaScript is often faster than jQuery. Than jQuery 3, At least.
I’m excited someone here actually is using jQuery 4. Maybe that means it’s more popular than I thought? I really felt like I was the only one using it lol.
I'm still using jQuery, a very slim build. Our JS library/framework handles all the heavy lifting, including AJAX, WebSockets, logical events, data manipulation, and architectural events. Replacing jQuery would be relatively easy since we often use our own extended jQuery functions, like our custom 'onClick' (which has a different implementation in the mobile version of our web app). Consequently, the question of whether to remove jQuery arises with every major client-side code upgrade. However, because other plugins rely on it and we prefer not to reinvent the wheel for basic DOM manipulation, we decided to keep it during our last discussion. I was pleased to learn that jQuery 4 also focuses on a slim build. Given its current small size, less than 20kb gzipped, I don't believe we'll be replacing it anytime soon.
(Dani, I hope you are feeling better. Wishing you a painless recovery.)
Every additional JS library slows down loading of the site. I haven't used jQuery for a long time, so I would like to know: does the new jQuery have something that can't be done with the DOM API and CSS?
Given that jQuery is a front-end JavaScript library, its goal is to make writing your front end JavaScript easier and quicker than writing native JavaScript. However, as it is written on top of native JavaScript, there’s nothing it can’t do that native JavaScript ultimately cannot. It just might take a whole bunch more lines of code in native JS. So that’s the allure of jQuery. I don’t suppose that’s changed with jQuery 4.
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