Bootstrap 5 alpha— Whats new?

Published in

Web For You

3 min readJun 24, 2020

“Bootstrap 5 alpha was officially released on June 16, 2020 after several months of refining. With all of the major changes in this version, the Boostrap 5 development team informed the users that the current version is still in alpha version thus, breaking changes will continue to occur until the first beta is released so it’s better to always check the open issues and pull requests on their official GitHub repository for open questions and feedback.”

Lets first take a glance of what have changed:

jQuery was completely removed
Dropped Internet Explorer v-10 and v-11 support
Switched completely to vanilla JavaScript
Improved grid system
Improved documentation
Improved forms
New responsive font
New utilities & helpers
Easier customization & theming
Lighter package
New API available

Here are a few changes and a brief description about them:

1.New Logo:

New logo is out for bootstrap 5 alpha.

2. jQuery removed :

New version of bootstrap does not depends on jQuery.
The bootstrap team has removed jQuery from 11 plugins including Util, Alert, Button, Carousel, and more. Using ‘Data’ and ‘EventHandler’ in unit tests is no longer supported.
Not only just Bootstrap but many other companies have been thinking of decoupling from jQuery. For example, last year, Github incrementally removed jQuery from their frontend mainly because of the rapid evolution of web standards and jQuery losing its relevancy over time.
While I was scrolling about reading why bootstraps’ new version will not depend on jQuey, i came across an answer :

— “I think the reason is that many of the problems jQuery was designed to solve (DOM manipulation, cross-browser compatibility issues, AJAX, cool effects) have now been implemented as standards, either in JaaScript or CSS and many developers consider the 55k minified download not worth it.”

3. Ends support to Internet explorer v10 and v11:

New version of bootstrap has dropped the support of Internet Explorer v-10 and v-11 which was earlier in Bootstrap version 4. Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s old browser.
If end users still want to support Internet Explorer 10 and 11, they should continue to use the current version of Bootstrap v-4.

4. JavaScript related changes:

Bootstrap 5 alpha blog has provided us the full list of changes on github to know what were the changes made.

5. forms updated:

Custom form controls for things like checkboxes ,radio, switches or files were possible in Bootstrap 4, but in Bootstrap 5, the claim is that they’ve gone fully custom with standard markup.

source : https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2020/06/16/bootstrap-5-alpha/

6. Grid System Enhanced:

“xxl” have been added after sm,md,l,xl as a new grid tier.
.gutter classes have been replaced with .g* utilities.
Form layout options have been replaced with the new grid system.
Vertical spacing classes have been added.
Columns are no longer position: relative by default.

For more updates of the new version and whats next? You can read the official blog from bootstrap: