jQuery 1.8 Released

Posted on by

August just got a little hotter, because jQuery 1.8 final code is here! You can pick up the code from jQuery’s CDN:

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.0.min.js (compressed and minified, for production)

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8.0.js (uncompressed, for debugging)

As usual, the Google and Microsoft CDNs will also have the file soon. Please don’t ask us about when they’ll be there, we don’t know and we don’t control those CDNs! Use our copies directly from the jQuery CDN above if you’re just itching to get started. It’s the same bits.

We don’t expect to get any bug reports on this release, since there have been several betas and a release candidate that everyone has had plenty of opportunities to thoroughly test. Ha ha, that joke never gets old. We know that far too many of you wait for a final release before even trying it with your code. So now there is really no reason to wait, and you can find out if there are any bugs you could have reported earlier.

If you do find a bug, please create a test case on jsFiddle or jsbin and file a bug on our bug tracker. If you’re not sure whether you’ve found a bug, ask on our forum. jQuery core 1.8.0 is compatible with the latest versions of jQuery UI (1.8.22), and jQuery Mobile (1.1.1). Be sure to update those if you’re reporting bugs on pages that involve them.

A Whirlwind Tour of jQuery 1.8

Let’s just recap the big changes in this release:

Sizzle re-architected: jQuery’s selector engine is faster than ever, thanks to a rewrite (well, really two rewrites) by Timmy Willison. Sure, most browsers have querySelectorAll nowadays, but nearly every implementation falls short in one way or another, creating a road full of cross-browser potholes. Sizzle smoothes that road for you. Plus, you may want those useful jQuery selector extensions like :has() with a complex selector or :contains() . Oh yeah, and there’s still IE6/7 support.

Animations re-imagined: Over time, the animation code in jQuery had become kind of messy. Corey Frang took a head-first dive into that swamp and managed to remove most of the alligators, um, bugs. Most of the changes are under the covers, so existing animations should just work (and work better). But there are also some awesome additions to make animations more general and extendable. One notable and very cool feature is the use of the progress callbacks in Promises. We’re still working on detailed documentation, but we do have a draft. Also, here’s an example of the new code in action: http://jsbin.com/odocid/1/edit.

Automatic CSS prefixing: When you use a CSS property, in either .css() or .animate() , we’ll use the correct prefixed property (when appropriate) for that browser. For example, take .css("user-select", "none") ; in Chrome/Safari we’ll set the value as "-webkit-user-select" , Firefox will use "-moz-user-select" , and IE10 will use "-ms-user-select" .

More flexibility with $(html, props): In jQuery 1.8, you can use any jQuery method or plugin in the object passed to $(html, props) . Before, you could only use a short list of method names, and there was no documented way to add to the list. Now there doesn’t need to be a list at all! Be aware, however, that this can cause the behavior of your code to change if plugins are added later that have the same names as HTML attributes.

More than 160 bugs closed: The Sizzle and animation rewrites in particular provided the impetus to fix several long-standing bugs–some of which have been around for two or three years. Mike Sherov tackled most of the open CSS and positioning issues, getting us down to near-zero bugs there. We also haven’t given up and are still pounding away to eliminate annoying differences between IE 6/7/8 and modern browsers, so you don’t have to deal with them.

Smaller code size: Despite all the code cleanup, new features, and bug fixes, the gzipped file size of jQuery 1.8 is actually a few hundred bytes smaller than jQuery 1.7.2. Size reduction wasn’t our primary goal in this version, but we felt it was important to hold the line on code growth, and we definitely achieved that. Many thanks to Richard Gibson for leading the code-crunching charge across the entire project.

Modularity: If you know your project’s jQuery dependencies well, you can use the new grunt -based build system to strip out parts of jQuery that you know you don’t need. What we’ve done here for 1.8 is really just a beginning, you’ll see even more flexibility as we move to later versions.

The full changelog is available below, in case you’re wondering whether your favorite bug was squashed.

What’s Been Removed

The short answer is “very little”. We wanted to provide a generous notice period for deprecated features that will be removed in 1.9, to give people time to adapt their code. Several of the things removed in 1.8 were undocumented internals that some people have cleverly reverse engineered, but it’s always risky to use undocumented features. Here are the items removed:

$(element).data(“events”): In version 1.6, jQuery separated its internal data from the user’s data to prevent name collisions. However, some people were using the internal undocumented “events” data structure so we made it possible to still retrieve that via .data() . This is now removed in 1.8, but you can still get to the events data for debugging purposes via $._data(element, "events") . Note that this is not a supported public interface; the actual data structures may change incompatibly from version to version.

Deferred.isResolved() and Deferred.isRejected(): Calling N-1 boolean methods to get the state of an N-state variable was getting a bit silly, so we added Deferred.state() in jQuery 1.7 to tell you the state in a single call. So, these two older methods aren’t needed anymore. It’s much more convenient for debugging scenarios where you often want to know the state of a Deferred as a string.

$(element).closest(Array) returning Array: This was a strange signature of the .closest() method intended for use by the old .live() , but not used by any other code as far as we know. Normal uses of .closest() returning a jQuery object are not affected by this signature being removed.

$.curCSS: This method was simply an alias for jQuery.css() from jQuery 1.3 onward. Although it has never been part of the documented API, some external code has been known to use it, perhaps thinking it was “more efficient.” Now it’s “more gone.”

$.attrFn: Yet another undocumented item, used to define which methods could be used in conjunction with $(html, props) signature. Although it serves no functional purpose in jQuery 1.8, we are leaving an empty $.attrFn in jQuery to prevent code that uses it from throwing errors. Fair Warning: This will be removed entirely in jQuery 1.9, so update your code!

Where Credit’s Due

This release couldn’t have happened without the hard work of the talented jQuery Core team: Julian Aubourg (jaubourg), Corey Frang (gnarf), Richard Gibson (gibson042), Mike Sherov (mikesherov), Rick Waldron (rwaldron), and Timmy Willison (timmywil).

Special recognition goes to these jQuery team and community members who supported the Core team with patch contributions during the jQuery 1.8 development cycle: Andy Monat, Robert Katic, Joaoh Bruni, Sindre Sorhus, Oleg Gaidarenko, Yehuda Katz, Timo Tijhof, Dominik D. Geyer, Scott González, Jörn Zaefferer, Matt Farmer, Trey Hunner, Jason Moon, Ben Alman, Jeffery To, Kris Borchers, Daniel Herman, Vladimir Zhuravlev, Jacob Thornton, Chad Killingsworth, Nowres Rafid, David Benjamin, Uri Gilad, Chris Faulkner, Elijah Manor, and Daniel Chatfield.

We’re also very thankful to those of you who took the time to report bugs; we can’t possibly fix a bug unless we know it exists. If you’re looking for an easy way to contribute to jQuery, get to know the bug tracker and help us by creating reduced test cases that clearly demonstrate bugs. Once we can reproduce a problem, a solution usually isn’t too far away. Those test cases become the foundation for a unit test that can prevent the problem from happening when we change code in later revisions.

jQuery 1.8 Change Log

Ajax

#8205: JSONP random result is causing memory leak in IE8

#8653: jQuery.param outputs "null" and "undefined" in the query string

#9399: Deprecate jqXHR.success and jqXHR.error

#10285: evalScript rcleanScript replacement fails in IE8

#10524: jQuery.fn.load does not merge data parameter with jQuery.ajaxSetup

#10944: $.ajax does not always return an object implementing the Promise interface

#11013: Deprecate use of Deferred/Promise with sync $.ajax

#11402: evalScript function fails with error error 80020101 in IE

#11743: jQuery silently ignores errors during script tag ajax request in $.appendTo()

#11778: Cached XHR requests should still resolve asynchronously

#12122: jQuery.ajax() async deprecate use with $.Deferred

Attributes

#11153: jQuery 1.7 Strips Carriage Returns in IE 8

#11212: Sizzle.getText converts unbreakable space into whitespace on IE

#11547: XML DOM .removeAttr() doesn't remove cased attributes

#11962: Standardize getter return values for empty sets.

#12127: Clone does not correctly copy checked state in IE10

Build

#11767: Support custom build without effects

#11789: Update README to describe grunt build system

#11856: modularize dimensions

#11857: modularize css

#11865: modularize offset

#11965: Create deprecated.js to contain as much of the deprecated stuff as possible

#12059: `grunt custom` should minify – also should add excluded modules to headers

#12158: jQuery 1.8rc1 does not work with YUICompressor 1.4.7

Core

#10657: Deprecate jQuery#size() in favor of jQuery#length

#11290: selector interpreted as HTML

#11470: Adding a builtin readyP promise

#12018: $(document).ready() fires too early in IE8

#12026: Let $(html, props) use any jQuery.fn method

Css

#10373: `document.defaultView` => `window`

#10394: jQuery.cssHooks.opacity throws exception on non-IE browsers

#10413: width, innerWidth, innerHeight, outerWidth, outerHeight are inaccurate for a "box-sizing: border-box" child of hidden parent

#10679: CSS3 vendor prefix support

#11004: getWH incorrectly removes padding and border width when box-sizing is border-box

#11787: Remove jQuery.curCSS

#12088: Webkit now returning percentages for more getComputedStyle properties

#12148: hide event don't fire when toggle

Data

#7579: jQuery.data() truncates numbers taken from data-xxx attributes

#10589: Remove $.fn.data("events")

#11435: Obsolete test code to remove toJSON from .data's return value

Deferred

#11010: Make Deferred.then == Deferred.pipe like Promise/A

#11011: Allow traditional options object for $.Callbacks flags

#11736: Remove Deferred .isResolved() and .isRejected()

#11749: Preserve context objects when multiple Deferred object are passed to $.when()

Dimensions

#6724: wrong $(window).height() in mobile safari (iphone)

#10877: Make outerWidth/Height a setter

#11293: Reading width or outerWidth of empty TDs alters columns width values

#11604: Switch $(elem).width(-val) from no-op to $(elem).width(0)

#11724: $(document).height() changed in Firefox 12

Effects

#7109: animate width starts with invalid width on webkit

#7157: Animation callback shows element is still ":animated"

#8387: flickering problem with jQuery 1.5 hide/show issue with inline and inline-block elements on webkit browsers

#8627: .animate() fails on letterSpacing in IE (regression in 1.5.1)

#8892: Callback is raised before objects are shown with fadeIn() and jQuery.fx.off = true

#9217: javascript error in IE8 when animating element is removed before animation finishes

#9505: animate() issue when mixing percentages and pixels in WebKit

#11635: Explicit overflow:auto is overridden by inline overflow:hidden during animation

#11755: animate and it aliases should not use :hidden selector

#11797: New animation related events

#11854: percentage animations jump to end

#11971: Animating background-position fails in IE8

#11999: Incremental animation on fixed div does subtraction instead of addition in Chrome.

#12117: overflow hidden not properly set when animating to 0 height or width

#12138: fadeOut doesn't work in Chrome on basic SVG elements

#12150: border-spacing property accumulates when rows are shown and hidden

Event

#8545: Leak with events in IE

#10067: Firing $.ready on document.readyState === 'interactive' too

#10895: The doScrollCheck ie hack in bindReady degrades ie7 performance for no reason whatsoever

#11101: Deprecate "exclusive" events option from trigger method

#11315: Problems with delegate() and :first in nested elements with equivalent classes

#11328: Ctrl key doesn't set event.metaKey to true on Windows

#11382: Mouseenter doesn't fire on a disabled input element

#11500: Bug : "change" event handler not executed when triggered manually on IE7 & IE8

#11621: Triggering a event on document doesn't bubble to window

#11718: Deprecate .data() events

#11719: Deprecate .bind("ready") event

#11731: Deprecate "hover" pseudo-event

#11733: Deprecate .load(), .unload(), and .error() methods

#11764: Allow delegated non-native events on disabled elements

#11786: Deprecate .toggle( handler, handler, … ) signature

#12203: .undelegate() with no arguments unbinds all handlers from the parent element

Manipulation

#8894: appendTo() and alike methods called after clone() returns incorrect jQuery set in IE

#10324: Clone does not copy innerHTML of object element in IE9

#11231: Append, Prepend, After, Before should accept an array as first argument

#11325: Improve domManip/buildFragment/clean

#11338: Inconsistent behavior with .replaceWith() and disconnected nodes.

#11528: ie8 serialization bug with .html() also hitting html5 tags

#11566: node.append et al. does not work when node is a DocumentFragment

#11617: Define a $.parseHTML method for creating HTML fragments

#11809: Memory leak in .text(val) setter?

#11898: prevAll() with a complicated :not() selector returns results in wrong order

#12132: IE10 bug when cloning an object element without a parentNode

Offset

#10996: Simplify offset()

#11823: Remove webkitConvertPointFromNodeToPage

Selector

#3778: selector matching issues

#5568: Selectors behave differently with comments tags on FF/IE

#7596: xpath selector attribute name with brackets [] fails

#8473: In IE9rc *[tabIndex] select all elements without tabindex also

#8906: .(prevAll('span:has(input,select,textarea)')

#9400: Deprecate :text, :radio, :checkbox, etc. selector extensions

#9810: Rewrite Positional Selector Logic

#10003: Regression/BC break from #6963

#10074: Chaining two [] selector with :first not working

#10499: :nth-child() inside :has() treated as if outside it

#10570: :text selector throws an error in IE7 when there is a cross domain iframe on the page

#10697: Sizzle revamp

#10799: Inconsistent results with [name="name"] selectors (also breaks .has)

#10809: incorrect test using ".activeElement" in the :focus pseudo-class resolver

#11109: Sizzle: Expr.relative truncates prematurely

#11120: Tabs in some selectors break in IE7

#11814: Sizzle's element-rooted QSA strategy (i.e. attaching a temporary id) does not account for comma and other other selector divisions

#11826: Explore a parsed caching system for matchesSelector within Sizzle

#11902: :not + :contains selectors

#11918: :eq selector problem when using tag name with ':'

#11959: Add support for :active selector

#11961: "Maximum call stack size exceeded" when using jQuery#is

#11966: descendant selector

#11969: Missing null check when gathering siblings

#12054: Uncaught TypeError: Object #<HTMLDocument> has no method 'getAttribute'

#12057: Sizzle Regression

#12082: .find() POS selector no longer working in 1.8b2

#12153: Error occurs in the selector

Support

#9385: Deprecate jQuery.browser

#11163: jQuery.support.checkClone always true

#11249: CSP error in Chrome 18 when loading jQuery 1.7.1

#11439: jQuery.support.parentNode used, but not defined any more.

#11721: deprecate and remove internal uses of jQuery.support.boxModel

#11757: IE 8 memory accumulation in iframes with jQuery 1.7.2

#11766: Move jQuery.support to "unstable" status

Traversing