jQuery v4.0 Beta

For those of you who are curious what drives jQuery in 2024 and beyond, you need to remember that WordPress is still more than 1&#x2F;3 of the web, and the majority of installations and so many plugins critically rely on jQuery. Yes, seriously.<p>Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great. jQuery will probably be around dominantly on the web for years to come.

I&#x27;m consistently surprised by the commenters on HN who seem to think jQuery is just a DOM selection library, when in fact it is a widely supported, incredibly stable tool set for (yes) DOM selection, but also attribute manipulation, Ajax requests, event handling, animation, and general utility functions. What&#x27;s more, where there _is_ native functionality that replaces jQuery, the API is never as fluent.<p>For work that needs a little enhancement on top of server-side HTML, but not a full-blown JS UI framework, jQuery is a small price to pay for a stable, reliable, and cross-browser compatible dependency.

In a world where many of us are actively trying to remove the last vestiges of jQuery, who is actively developing using jQuery? Genuinely curious. I’ve found that most of what I went to jQuery before is baked in now. querySelectorAll being the most powerful.

Awesome. My problem is I&#x27;ve been waiting for 4.0 soooo long I ended up making my own jQuery with some key differences:<p><pre><code> * Animations, tweens, timelines use pure CSS, instead of jQuery&#x27;s custom system. * Use one element or lists transparently. * Inline &lt;script&gt; Locality of Behavior. No more inventing unique &quot;one time&quot; names. * Vanilla first. Zero dependencies. 1 file. Under 340 lines. </code></pre> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gnat&#x2F;surreal">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gnat&#x2F;surreal</a><p>That said, it&#x27;s fantastic to see 4.0 here, and I&#x27;ll certainly be upgrading my many sites that use it!

This throws me back to my junior days (2008~) where i had a heated discussion with my technical lead, to add jQuery to a project.<p>His argument was that the size of minified library(40kb) would add too much overhead to the loading time of the page.<p>He then, promptly spent a full week trying to code an ajax call and testing its support on different browsers and ultimately failed to make it work on Internet explorer 5.<p>jQuery solves many headaches back then, and yes he finally added the library to the project.

Great job jQuery folks! I will forever love jQuery. It simply gets the job done.

With browsers having much better support with DOM selection, why would anyone be using jQuery in 2024? Not trying to throw shade, I actually think it&#x27;s cool that it&#x27;s still being worked on. But I&#x27;m confused as to what the use case is.

FWIW we built our entire low code platform drag and drop editor with jquery. This includes editor, all controls (read Ui components) and needlessly to say that even the code that it ends up generating is pure play jquery. But the execs at big corps often question our sales engineering for why not react&#x2F;angular&#x2F; etc.<p>So I am super glad to read that jquery continues to be so relevant even now. And am glad my cofounder and CTO always continued to back this rather than looked at moving the stack.

I remember when jQuery was first released. To convince my coworkers to use it, I held an internal presentation called &quot;Don&#x27;t Fear the $,&quot; where I walked through the advantages it provided.

I remember jQuery from it&#x27;s heyday when we used it as a replacement for Mootools. Since many people are going from React to HTMX, maybe we&#x27;ve made a full circle and we&#x27;ll see web using just plain jQuery as well?

I wrote puter.com using jQuery :P

Oh I loved jQuery.<p>Anybody remembers DataTables <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datatables.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datatables.net</a> or X-editable <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vitalets.github.io&#x2F;x-editable&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vitalets.github.io&#x2F;x-editable&#x2F;</a> ?

I loved jQuery. Still great, but browser APIs have improved.<p>Now I mainly use AJQuery: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coolaj86&#x2F;ajquery.js&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;ajquery.js">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;coolaj86&#x2F;ajquery.js&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;ajquery.js</a>

Just in case folks aren&#x27;t familiar, this site breaks down jQuery features into web standard code: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;</a>

I learned jQuery before i learned javascript proper over a decade ago. I didn’t even really understand what i was doing was considered programming. although i’ve not touched jquery in many years, i now have a great livelihood doing something i love. Long may they live.

Bring yayQuery back. The people demand it.

I remember building web apps in the days before jQuery, it was a mess. The DOM APIs were full of quirks, and all the libraries that predated jQuery had their own issues.<p>These days, we have better options for building complex web apps, including much-improved native APIs. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve started a new project using jQuery in 10 years. But for maintainin a lightweight website that just needs a little bit of interaction or pizzazz, I still think jQuery is perfectly fine.

A lot of what jQuery was created to do is now baked into the browser. CSS selectors, proper ajax, animation, etc.<p>I built a small convenience library around fetch to make it super easy to use ajax like in jQuery. Also built a small utility library around ES6 methods that recreate jQuery methods. It doesn&#x27;t take much to get back the convenience of jQuery but still use all the new tools.<p>I love jQuery and used it for years. But there are better tools now.

Jquery made it to version 4 beta and there&#x27;s a version 5 in the future. it looks like there&#x27;s a big enough market for JQuery.

For the functions that are being removed, is there a list of the native replacements. eg $.isNumeric() == parseFloat() ?

I like Vue&#x27;s reactive nature the best (specifically `v-if`, `v-for`), but jQuery was the one that got me over the hump before I actually knew Javascript.<p>And I encourage most projects that use a lot of jQuery to consider using jQuery&#x27;s CDN version as there is like a 50%+ chance the person already has it cached on their system.

Time to send letters to the core js standards team to ask JR for permission (plus giving him a briefcase and a deus ex machina ;)) to bring the full jQuery treatment into core JS. In order to replace the cumbersome JS things with jQuery. Why always complicate things...

Worst part of jQuery is actually upgrading it to a new version, because the api design that made jQuery powerful is also what makes it quite difficult figure out if you broke anything.

Nothing to add. Just happy to see jQuery is still around. It&#x27;s easy to forgot how widely used (depended on, rather?) it still is.

Always depressed when I saw some new JS library promote<p>&quot;No jQuery&quot; is one of its main features

I still use it as my low level html operations lib in my framework. Its still super handy. And size wise small.

I&#x27;ll still take jQuery over raw JavaScript. Much easier, more efficient, more intuitive.

If most of the web didn&#x27;t have a huge jQuery dependancy, we would have mostly moved on years ago.

Most elegant API for Javascript, can it become part of Javascript API directly one day?

I feel like most of Jquery has been re implemented as browser api&#x27;s anyway.

I still think that MooTools was better.

Is jQuery the COBOL of the 2000s?

Another day another JavaScript framework! I&#x27;m so tired of all this churn in frontend. &#x2F;s

In job postings for FE developers, I usually put in this line:<p>“A healthy disdain for jQuery”<p>This changes nothing.

jQuery has mostly been replaced by new browser apis. It was a great library that brought the web forward. It will still be around the web for decades to come. If you&#x27;re updating to jQuery 4. Why not try switching to native js.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youmightnotneedjquery.com&#x2F;</a>

I was evaluating a SaaS solution just yesterday, and in one of their examples on Github they used jQuery as the primary frontend for the project, with extensive usage.<p>I passed on the company