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Last January 14th 2009 was the birthday of our lovely jQuery javascript library, Happy Birthday! Since January 14th 2006 jQuery team were improving more and more the library and yesterday they have released a new version: jQuery 1.3. And as you may suppose it comes with new great features:

• Sizzle: A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine.
• Live Events: Event delegation with a jQuery twist.
• jQuery Event Overhaul: Completely rewired to simplify event handling.
• HTML Injection Rewrite: Lightning-fast HTML appending.
• Offset Rewrite: Super-quick position calculation.

So guys, let’s jump into new features, taking a look to some tests performance to see what’s going on with this 1.3 jQuery version and his performance.

Sizzle

Sizz… what? Sizzle it’s a DOM elements selector developed by John Resig, allowing people find DOM elements faster in whatever library they use. In words of his creator:

4x faster in Firefox 3, 3x faster in Opera 9, 1.5x faster in Safari 3 than the other major JavaScript libraries. It’s completely standalone (no library dependencies) and clocks in at under 4kb.

That was fast, uh? Let’s take a look at this graphic performance:

Conclusion…? jQuery 1.3 it’s faster than other common javascript libraries and faster than old version jQuery 1.2.6. Well not bad for developers and users…

Live Events

This feature makes me smile a little… In some old tutorials like How to load content via AJAX in jQuery people find some problems with their dynamic generated content because events didn’t work fine with them. Some of us suggest to rebind or just use Live jQuery plugin.

Now with jQuery 1.3 and his event delegation you won’t need to redefine events associated to dynamic generated elements.

Yeah Kudos for jQuery!

jQuery Event Overhaul & No More Browser Sniffing

With the revision of events in jQuery we got now simple event handling.

No more browser sniffing… But to avoid problems with current scripts that make use of jQuery.browser it’s not deprecated from the core, but will be deleted in future revisions.

Now browser/useragent aren’t in use so one more time jQuery will be faster than previous version.

I am not sure if it’s good or not, but it seems that a lot of people is disagree with that decision. What about you?

HTML Injection Rewrite

Yes… at last guys! Some methods like jQuery.html(), jQuery.append() and others responsible of generate dynamic HTML have been rewriten, givin us a better performance.

Rewriting HTML injection methods we got a better performance of 6x in some cases.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Oh my godness, this new feature will make so faster all our websites. Yarrr! We must include jQuery 1.3 in Plusmusica as fast as possible! We make use of that methods in many cases

Offset Rewrite

One more time new features give us a better performance…

offset() method was rewriten, now it’s faster. In some cases 3x faster versus the old version jQuery 1.2.6.

Conclusions

There is no doubt, jQuery team did it again. I am not sure if we can say 2008 was the jQuery year, but I am sure 2009 will be event better… and faster

You can download the new jQuery 1.3 production version here (18Kb, minified and gzipped) and the jQuery 1.3 development version here (114Kb, uncompressed code).

See you soon guys and happy jQuery development!