Today, jQuery UI continues to be an important testbed for jQuery Core updates, helping the maintainer team spot bugs and interoperability issues that arise as the web platform evolves. In its heyday, jQuery UI was adopted by a broad set of enterprises including Pinterest, PayPal, IMDB, Huffington Post, and Netflix. The tool helped developers build UI components such as form controls and date pickers using the best practices back then. It quickly gained popularity because it was one of the best tested and most accessible UI frameworks of its time. JQuery UI was first launched in September 2007 as a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery library. Trac, the project’s bug-tracking tool, has been put in read-only mode and developers are asked to file any critical issues on the project’s GitHub repository. Users should not expect any new releases, though patches may be issued to resolve critical security, interoperability, or regression bugs. The release is part of an ongoing series of updates across all jQuery projects. The jQuery UI Download Builder has also been restored and updated so developers can continue to download UI along with their favorite themes.
Perhaps the most important update is that jQuery UI 1.13 now runs on the latest version of jQuery Core, providing a number of browser compatibility and security updates that have been missing from previous releases, in addition to community fixes and improvements. Today, jQuery UI announced version 1.13 - its first release in 5 years and the project’s final planned release. As part of its ongoing effort to modernize the project, jQuery maintainers have taken steps to wind down one of its projects under the jQuery umbrella through a careful transition. The jQuery project is actively maintained and widely implemented - it’s used by 73% of 10 million most popular websites. Authors: Michał Gołębiowski-Owczarek, Felix Nagel, and the jQuery team