jQuery Mobile 1.4 Release Candidate 1 is now available. The focus of this new version is on performance improvements. It introduces several widgets and screen furniture, a new default theme and SVG icons.

The jQuery Mobile 1.4 Beta release notes explain that for this version DOM manipulation was reduced as much as possible. Generation of inner markup for elements styled as buttons was completely removed and they avoided adding classes.

This releases introduces to a new default theme with a flat, more modern, design in which there are just two swatches - a light “A” swatch and a dark “B” swatch as shown here:

There is also a change to the way theme inheritance works. In previous versions JavaScript was used to find the nearest parent element with a theme and theme classes were added to all elements. This has been replaced by a pure CSS solution where the level of specificity of the selector determines what theme (swatch) is applied. In almost all cases the default for option theme has been removed and widgets get the same theme as their container or page via CSS.

In addition to the new theme there's a complete new set of vector-based SVG icons from Glyphish, although there's still a fallback to external PNG icons for browsers that don’t support inline SVG via Grunticon.

New widgets are a big feature of this release There's now a flip switch widget, a generic filter widget named “filterable”, the tabs widget from jQuery UI has also been integrated. Popups with arrows, tooltips for sliders, enhancements to toolbars and touch events with teardown methods are also among the improvements on offer.

More Information

jQuery Mobile 1.4.0 RC1 Released

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