jQuery 3.4 is here: More than a year has passed since the last feature release, now with v3.4 the expected last minor version of jQuery 3 is ready. Among other things, they worked on the performance. There is also news about v4. Is jQuery on the way to the future?
jQuery 3.4 has been released. The new version of the old library brings changes that should have a positive effect on performance, as well as support for new features and deprecations that are targeted to v4. After delivering a single new feature in January 2018, this is the biggest update jQuery has received in two years. It was also announced that release cycle 3.x should end with the now released version. The next update will be jQuery 4.0, for which a major overhaul is planned.
jQuery 3.4: Forward-looking Deprecations
However, jQuery 3.4 has now resolved a layout processing issue that has affected performance. So far it had come in the calculation of .width and .height to problems, through which the layout had to be recalculated. This recalculation process is now prevented in all browsers except Internet Explorer – in IE the problem is inevitable, as Timmy Willison writes in the release notes for jQuery 3.4. In addition, jQuery has received support for nonce and nomodule . For the use of radio input elements, this version comes with a bugfix that is already known from checkboxes. Even with radio elements, the property checked now updated before the event handler is executed.
Also a small security gap closed the jQuery team. This occurred when using jQuery.extend(true, {}, …) and was an unexpected behavior. For this reason, they decided to take care of the problem – otherwise, security lies outside the scope of the library, such as can be found in the release notes.
For a first look at the changes planned for jQuery 4, see the list of deprecations of the current version. There it is noted that the current works are aimed at the removal of sizzle. This is the selector engine that has been used so far. To replace the engine with a simple wrapper, now :first :nth :gt and :nth deprecated.
When jQuery 4 is to be published is not known. However, there are already plans for the new major version, as can be seen from the corresponding milestone on GitHub . The oldest issues assigned to the Milestone jQuery 4 date from 2014.
The fact that there is still a need for jQuery is shown most recently by the Stack Overflow Survey 2019. jQuery and React are currently the most commonly used JavaScript frameworks by respondents. The move to a revamped version 4 is likely to be of interest to developers.