The frontend world has been shaken by news that many would have dismissed as a joke just a few years ago. jQuery 4.0.0 has been officially released. While we were busy burying this library in history books, it evolved, dropped its legacy baggage, and returned to the game at the perfect moment.
This sensation matters for reasons beyond just a version number. It highlights the deep crisis of over-engineering that the modern stack has forced upon us. Today, we routinely deploy React or Vue even for simple tasks like toggling classes or submitting a landing page form. We create massive dependency trees for basic interactivity, justifying it with "scalability" that most projects will never actually need.
jQuery 4.0.0 offers an alternative to this madness. The developers have done a massive cleanup, removing support for Internet Explorer and outdated APIs. As a result, the library is significantly lighter. This is a critical win for performance: you now get a modern tool that weighs less and runs faster, without forcing the user to download kilobytes of dead code.
It is now a modern tool based on ES modules, perfectly suited for quick solutions. When you need to build a promo page or a corporate site in an evening, you don't need hooks, state managers, or endless bundler configurations. You need a tool that just works directly in the browser and doesn't bloat your page size.
The competition with React here is philosophical. It is a battle between engineering overhead and common sense. The sensation isn't just that jQuery updated; it’s that it once again looks like a logical choice against the backdrop of bloated frameworks. For many small projects and landing pages, this is a return to a time when development was fast and results were predictable.
Perhaps this release will serve as a wake-up call for the industry. It is time to admit that not every website needs to be a complex single-page application. Sometimes, simply connecting one lightweight file and finishing the job in five minutes is better than spending hours configuring an architecture that only gets in the way.
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