After a considerable gap between releases, jQuery 3.6 is out, bringing with it bug fixes and improvements. Despite what you might think, it is still very relevant.

These days jQuery is a workhorse that doesn't attract much attention. However as noted in our report on the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reminds us it is the most widely used, with a 43% share, outstripping React with 40% so it would be wrong to ignore it. Looking at another survey, that of Ruby On Rails developers, in which developers could select multiple options, 60% of respondents said they used jQuery as the JavaScript library alongside Rails, with React in second place with under 50%.

It is just 10 months since the previous release of jQuery and version 3.5.1 was merely "a quick fix for a regression" in jQuery 3.5 and rolled back a troublesome change to the internal data object - which was to useObject.create( null )instead of a plain object ({}). The plan is to reintroduce that change in jQuery 4.0.

Looking back at my report on the release of jQuery 3.5, it makes multiple mentions of jQuery 4.0 and while 3.5 did make an important security fix. it it obvious that development effort is focused on the next major release rather than the interim minor ones. 

According to the jQuery GitHub repo, jQuery 4 is now 73% complete, but as yet there is no release date and in the release announcement for jQuery 3.6, Timmy Willison writes:

We still have our eyes on a jQuery 4.0 release, but until then we will continue to support the 3.x branch and address important issues.

So what does jQuery 3.6 have for us? 

The new feature that merits a minor version upgrade is that jQuery will no longer respond with an executable script to errors in JSONP requests. The release announcements explains:

In previous versions, when a JSONP request responded with an error, often the response was still an executable script. We’ve changed the default behavior to try and execute the response in this situation. Normal scripts will still be skipped when an error is encountered.

There are also several bug fixes in the release. The one that is highlighted by Willison remedies behavior that occurs a focus handler is triggered inside another focus handler. The bug fix results in only propagating the last focus event up the DOM tree.

Other bug fixes include one for retrieving dimensions on table rows in Firefox and another for a crash in Chrome when a focusout event was triggered on a removed element. Several improvements have also been made to some tests.

For jQuery users who can't upgrade to the latest version, the announcement also points to patches for two vulnerabilities which affect all jQuery versions prior to 3.5.0.

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• Ian Elliot is the author of  Just jQuery: The Core UI and Just jQuery: Events, Async & AJAX which are part of the I Programmer Library published by I/O Press. 
  His other JavaScript titles in the same imprint are Just JavaScript: An Idiomatic Approach; JavaScript Async and JavaScript Bitmap Graphics with Canvas.

More Information

jQuery 3.6 Released 

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