On January 14, 2006, John Resig introduced a JavaScript library called jQuery at BarCamp in New York City. Now, 20 years later, the jQuery team is happy to announce the final release of jQuery 4.0.0. After a long development cycle and several pre-releases, jQuery 4.0.0 brings many improvements and modernizations. It is the first major version release in almost 10 years and includes some breaking changes, so be sure to read through the details below before upgrading. Still, we expect that most users will be able to upgrade with minimal changes to their code.
Many of the breaking changes are ones the team has wanted to make for years, but couldn't in a patch or minor release. We've trimmed legacy code, removed some previously-deprecated APIs, removed some internal-only parameters to public functions that were never documented, and dropped support for some "magic" behaviors that were overly complicated.
We have an upgrade guide and jQuery Migrate plugin release ready to assist with the transition. Please upgrade and let us know if you encounter any issues.
As usual, the release is available on our CDN and the npm package manager. Other third party CDNs will probably have it available soon as well, but remember that we don’t control their release schedules and they will need some time. Here are the highlights for jQuery 4.0.0.
IE<11 support removed
jQuery 4.0 drops support for IE 10 and older. Some may be asking why we didn't remove support for IE 11. We plan to remove support in stages, and the next step will be released in jQuery 5.0. For now, we'll start by removing code specifically supporting IE versions older than 11.
We also dropped support for other very old browsers, including Edge Legacy, iOS versions earlier than the last 3, Firefox versions earlier than the last 2 (aside from Firefox ESR), and Android Browser. No changes should be required on your end. If you need to support any of these browsers, stick with jQuery 3.x.
Trusted Types and CSP
jQuery 4.0 adds support for Trusted Types, ensuring that HTML wrapped in TrustedHTML can be used as input to jQuery manipulation methods in a way that doesn't violate the require-trusted-types-for Content Security Policy directive.
Along with this, while some AJAX requests were already using <script> tags to maintain attributes such as crossdomain, we have since switched most asynchronous script requests to use <script> tags to avoid any CSP errors caused by using inline scripts. There are still a few cases where XHR is used for asynchronous script requests, such as when the"headers" option is passed (use scriptAttrs instead!), but we now use a <script> tag whenever possible.
jQuery source migrated to ES modules
It was a special day when the jQuery source on the main branch was migrated from AMD to ES modules. The jQuery source has always been published with jQuery releases on npm and GitHub, but could not be imported directly as modules without RequireJS, which was jQuery's build tool of choice. We have since switched to Rollup for packaging jQuery and we do run all tests on the ES modules separately. This makes jQuery compatible with modern build tools, development workflows, and browsers through the use of <script type=module>.