The alpha version of Bootstrap 4 has been released on the 19th of August 2015 and it brought a lot of improvements such as flexbox, a better grid system, cards, improved navbars and switching Sass over Less. Additionally it took more than 2 years to bring it to a stable version on January 18th, 2018.

With that being said let’s analyze everything we know about Bootstrap 5’s release date and improvements.

Bootstrap 5 release date

Progress is looking really good on the official Github project tracking board with 686 tasks being shipped and roughly 35 more pending or being in review. Taking in consideration that they’re already working on the alpa-2 and alpha-3 versions, we can expect Bootstrap 5 to be released in late spring this year.

What’s new?

Some of the major changes will be removing jQuery altogether as a dependency, adding back custom icons powered by SVG (which they already launched last year), some CSS & Javascript simplifications, fixes and improvements and removing support for IE 10. 

Here’s a list of all the expected changes:

• Removing jQuery
• Dropping support for IE 10
• Custom SVG icon library
• Switching to Hugo from Jekyll
• Major Javascript updates
• Minor CSS and class updates and fixes

Removing jQuery 😱

This shouldn’t be a surprise as jQuery has been losing ground in times when frameworks such as React.js, Vue.js and Angular.js are being used by an increasing amount of developers across the world. Additionally many of jQuery’s querying features can be done by just writing vanilla Javascript query selector nowadays.

I believe this is a good time to do it as jQuery has served its purpose for a long time. Removing this dependency will lighten the project’s size considerably.

Dropping IE 10 support 📺

Internet Explorer 10 accounts for less than 1% of global browser usage and considering that since 2016 Microsoft ended support for version older and including 10 this is an understandable change.

Custom SVG icon library 🚀

Personally I was a bit disappointed with the lack of an integrated icon library for the 4th version. We usually use Font Awesome or custom SVG icons in our products, but we may soon change that. 

With the 5th version there’s a brand new SVG powered icon library coming created by Mark Otto. What’s even better is that it has already been released in December and you can use them in your projects right now!

Switching to Hugo from Jekyll 🔝

Jekyll has been around for a long time as a very popular Static Site Generator, however in recent years Hugo has been deemed to be the fastest and most recommended one. We see this change similar to what they did with the 4th version of Bootstrap by switching from Less to Sass.

Javascript & CSS

We expect huge changes to the core Javascript file as jQuery will no longer be part of the project. Expect going through a new documentation regarding event listeners and options. Regarding the CSS there are no major changes but we assume there will be some optimizations, class updates and general fixes.

In conclusion Bootstrap 5 should be faster, simpler and better looking. Don’t expect huge changes in terms of the base set of components, but rather appreciate the time it will save you developing beautiful user interfaces and the shorter loading time for the users.