jQuery, the omnipresent Javascript library used by millions of websites, has released its latest version 1.8 Final bringing with it smaller code, faster performance, and lots of bug fixes. While we can’t guarantee that all 3rd party plug-ins will work, it our quick tests we had zero issues when upgrading from jQuery 1.7.2.
Among the top reasons to update is a rewrite to jQuery’s selector engine called Sizzle. Its faster and more cross-browser compatible than ever. While most modern browsers support querySelectorAll, not all do and most have their own quirks. jQuery 1.8 takes care of all of that. And yes, good ol’ IE6/7 is still supported.
Another big benefit is the new feature called Automatic CSS Prefixing. This allows jQuery to prepend browser specific prefixes to CSS styles when called through jQuery’s .css() or .animate() methods. Want to set “user-select” to “none”? jQuery will use “-webkit-user-select” for Chrome and Safari, and “-moz-user-select” for Firefox. And yes, it will use “-ms-user-select” for IE10.
Having given the world such a wonder update, the folks over at jQuery managed to reduce its gzipped file size by a few hundred bytes. While this may not seem like much when loading a single page, do it a couple of million times and that starts to add up. Thanks jQuery Team!