Bootstrap is the world’s most popular front-end open-source toolkit that can be used to quickly design and customize responsive mobile-first websites. It features Sass variables and mixins, a responsive grid system, a collection of prebuilt components, and useful Javascript plugins.
The initial release of Bootstrap happened on August 19th, 2011 and it was originally named Twitter Blueprint. It was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at a Twitter hackathon called “Hack Week”. It was then released as an open-source project now being the seventh-most-starred project on Github.
Currently, the latest stable version of Bootstrap is v4.5 which brought many improvements compared to earlier versions by introducing flexbox, replacing Less with Sass, and other upgrades regarding classes and Javascript.
Bootstrap 5: removing jQuery
On 16th June of 2020, Bootstrap 5-alpha1 has been officially launched dropping jQuery as a dependency and also removing browser support for Internet Explorer 10 and 11. This came as a big surprise to the developers, especially the decision to no longer support Internet Explorer browsers.
Removing jQuery as a dependency comes as a welcoming update for two main reasons:
- You will save up to 82.54 KB for the loading time
- Many of the features of jQuery can now be done natively with Vanilla Javascript
You can read a tutorial on Bootstrap 5 and how to use it without jQuery.
Bootstrap ecosystem & community
Almost 10 years since the initial release, Bootstrap is being used by at least 8 million websites worldwide only through the official Bootstrap CDN. The community has built many tools, plugins, and templates using the popular CSS Framework.
You can check out some of the free and premium Bootstrap templates, themes, and UI kits that we have been working on here at Themesberg. It can save you a lot of time and also provide you with cutting edge design and code quality for your projects.