What's new in jQuery 1.8 Beta 1

Good News!!! jQuery 1.8 Beta 1 is released. The jQuery Core Team has been heads-down working on jQuery 1.8, and our first beta release is now available! In this post, I will show what's new with jQuery 1.8 and how can it help your existing code. You can get the code from the jQuery CDN:

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.8b1.js

Below is the list of new features that are coming with jQuery 1.8

• Build your own jQuery Version
  
  As of jQuery 1.8, you can build a custom version of jQuery that excludes one or more modules if you do not need their functionality. However jQuery will continue to be, distributed as a single file in both compressed and uncompressed form and available on CDNs.
  
  
• Browser Specific CSS
  
  Web developers are faced with the nightmare of including all the vendor-prefixed property names in stylesheets. jQuery 1.8 eases the pain a bit. We automatically take the non-prefixed property name and generate the prefix that is appropriate for the current browser.
  
  
• Improved Sizzle CSS Selector Engine
  
  jQuery’s selector engine has undergone a major rewrite in 1.8. The most notable benefit of this rewrite is a widespread performance improvement of selector matching as well as improved shortcuts for the most common selectors.
  
  
• New $.parseHTML() to avoid XSS attacks
  
  By design, the $() method can create HTML elements, and will run scripts if it is passed a <script> tag with inline script or a src attribute.
  
  jQuery 1.8 introduces a new method: $.parseHTML. It lets you specify strings as HTML and know that they will be parsed as HTML, something that $() cannot do since it also interprets strings as selectors.
  
  
• New $.Animation function
  
  If you need to support older browsers without built-in animations, the new $.Animation provides a solid foundation.
  
  
• $.browser is still available
  
  $.browser is deprecated but it is still available. But with jQuery 1.9 we’ll remove it entirely and you’ll need to use the 1.9 compat plugin.
  
  
• jQuery.size() is deprecated
  
  jQuery provides .size() method, which returns number of element in the object. But it is not preferred to use the size() method as jQuery provide .length property and which does the same thing. As .length property does not have the overhead of a function call.
  
  

And there are many more bug fixes.... You can take a look at list of fixed bugs here.

Feel free to contact me for any help related to jQuery, I will gladly help you.