Bootstrap 5 to replace jQuery with vanilla JavaScript

The upcoming major version of Bootstrap, version 5, will no longer have jQuery as a dependency and will be replaced with vanilla JavaScript. In 2017, the Bootstrap team opened a pull request with the aim to remove jQuery entirely from the Bootstrap source and it is now near completion.

Under this pull request, the team has removed jQuery from 11 plugins including Util, Alert, Button, Carousel, and more. Using ‘Data’ and ‘EventHandler’ in unit tests is no longer supported. Additionally, Internet Explorer will not be compatible with this version. Despite these updates, developers will be able to use this version both with or without jQuery. Since this will be a major release, users can expect a few breaking changes.

Not only just Bootstrap but many other companies have been thinking of decoupling from jQuery. For example, last year, GitHub incrementally removed jQuery from their frontend mainly because of the rapid evolution of web standards and jQuery losing its relevancy over time.

This news triggered a discussion on Hacker News, and many users were happy about this development. One user commented, “I think the reason is that many of the problems jQuery was designed to solve (DOM manipulation, cross-browser compatibility issues, AJAX, cool effects) have now been implemented as standards, either in Javascript or CSS and many developers consider the 55k minified download not worth it.”

Another user added, “The general argument now is that 95%+ of jQuery is now native in browsers (with arguably the remaining 5% being odd overly backward compatible quirks worth ignoring), so adding a JS dependency for them is "silly" and/or a waste of bandwidth.”

Read more in detail, check out Bootstrap’s GitHub repository.