Twenty years after its introduction, the jQuery team has released version 4.0.0. The first major release in almost 10 years brings significant improvements, modernizations, and breaking changes. Many users can upgrade with minimal changes to their code. Version 4.0.0 is intended to mark a new phase for the JavaScript library. The release follows a long development cycle with several pre-releases. The breaking changes are changes that the team has wanted to implement for years but was unable to do so in patch or minor releases.
Today's browsers can handle most of the problems that frontend frameworks were originally created to solve. Web Components provide encapsulation, ES modules manage dependencies, modern CSS features like Grid and container queries enable complex layouts, and the Fetch API covers network requests. Despite this, developers still default to React, Angular, Vue, or another JavaScript framework to address problems the browser already handles natively. That default often trades real user costs -page weight, performance, and SEO - for developer convenience.