Bootstrap 3.3.0 and Bootstrap 4

http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2014/10/29/bootstrap-3-3-0-released/

by rayshan • 12 years ago

329 140 12 years ago

blog.getbootstrap.com

mattmanser• 12 years ago

From Bootstrap 4:

Dropped support for IE8

That seems pretty premature.

LandoCalrissian2• 12 years ago

I feel like it's going pretty fast. Do Google or Facebook even officially support IE8 anymore? I think the quicker the issue is forced the better it is for everyone. IE9 is at the very least pretty acceptable to deal with.

Edit: Looks like Google doesn't even support IE9 anymore. https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864?hl=en

sytelus• 12 years ago

First, you are talking about Google Apps which is not same other mainstream Google websites.

Second, IE8 is still very popular browser with 20% market share. You don't want to lock out 1 in every 5 of your users.

Third, a major point of using frameworks is not having to worry about browsers. This is why making frameworks are hard.

Fourth, people who are stuck with IE8 or below are typically not by their choice.

Siecje2• 12 years ago

The latest Firefox has issues with Google sites http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...

simonsarris• 12 years ago

Consider that Bootstrap 3 isn't going away if you need IE8 support, and plenty of sites would be comfortable with that restriction. (Eg, all sites that use <canvas> in a non-fallback-able way)

jbeja• 12 years ago

I am so happy for this actualy and I hope that this promote others developers to completely drop support for IE8.

girvo• 12 years ago

If you can convince the 10% of Australia's population to stop using IE8, then I'd be happy to. As it stands, where I work charges a lot more for IE8 support, but most places are happy to pay it :(

chrisan• 12 years ago

ALL Developers want to drop support for IE8. Has anyone had fun developing a site for IE8?

Business owners looking to make profit anyway they can DO NOT.

We do A/B testing for very small % gains yet we are ok with delivering a site that wont work in IE8? It is a hard business case to make with clients.

I'm glad the framework is moving forward, we all like playing with new toys, but I hope there is an IE css file that will "fix it enough" to make it work for IE8

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...

Shows 7% for North America IE8

kbenson• 12 years ago

The statement may be more to test the waters than to state a hard and fast condition of Bootstrap 4. Also, it's not like someone can't just use the 3 series. For our internal app, we're still using Bootstrap 2.

spollock• 12 years ago

Not really. The only people who still need to support ie8 are in enterprise and the enterprise is usually a couple years behind. By the time they upgrade to bootstrap 4 ie8 support will have ended.

eterm• 12 years ago

I'm still working with major clients who insist their official browser is ie6.

We are in an awkward spot of soon having to say, "Sorry ie8 wasn't a suitable upgrade".

_random_2• 12 years ago

You know, humans work at enterprises. And we would appreciate reducing the crazy touch-friendly padding and margins as well!

squiggy22• 12 years ago

On highly trafficked sites , IE 8.0 usage can account for a fair amount of users, and conversions etc. It's a tougher decision to make to take those users off the table.

CCs• 12 years ago

Yes, many enterprise companies are behind, but not all.

We're enterprise and upgrading to 3.3 as we speak. We see a 4-8% of users coming in from older IE, mainly XP. We have customers in USA only.

Our public website: 3% IE7, 5.2% IE8

App: 1% IE7, 3.3% IE8

pageld• 12 years ago

My product's client base is 9% IE7 and 60% IE8. Mainly hospitals and .gov agencies use our system. It's getting really hard to even test with those browsers let alone find frameworks that will work for our client base and we can't even force them off, because "IT says we can't install anything because it's insecure." AH!

It's pretty bad. We once got a ticket to make sure our app works with "ALL BROWSERS" because it was broken in IE6. That ticket was 6 months ago. The users are out there.

freyr• 12 years ago

Bootstrap 3 still supports IE8. You can still use Bootstrap 3, or even Bootstrap 2.

But it makes little sense to develop new tools that support IE8 at this point. By the time Bootstrap 4 is released (probably many months from now), IE8 usage will be even lower.

Further, since it's solely responsible for so many edge cases, polyfills, and hacks, it doesn't hurt to gently push for its demise. Even Microsoft is trying.

jnbiche3• 12 years ago

Even Microsoft is trying.

Well why in the name of all good design did Microsoft not put out a version of IE9 for Windows XP while it was still supported? That would made everything so much simpler, including for them -- after all, they have to worry about IE8 just like the rest of us, XP or no.

LukeB_UK• 12 years ago

It's a 5 year old browser. The only operating system stuck on IE8 is Windows XP, a 13 year old operating system. I have a feeling that anyone still using it won't take much notice of things being a little broken.

acdha• 12 years ago

IE8 is under 4% now globally. Unless your customers are primarily large enterprise shops that's probably a reasonable trade-off even now, much less by the time Bootstrap 4 is actually released.

joshuacc• 12 years ago

I disagree. The company I work for provides software to schools and school districts, which tend to be pretty far behind the technological curve. After analyzing our usage patterns, we were able to drop IE8 recently.

AndrewDucker• 12 years ago

As of January 2016 all versions of IE below 11 will be dropped. By Microsoft.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/suppor...

LordHumungous• 12 years ago

The sooner it dies the better.

vlunkr2• 12 years ago

Well for one thing, Bootstrap 4 isn't out yet, so you're prematurely accusing them of acting prematurely.

malyk2• 12 years ago

They said the alpha is a couple of weeks away. Do you expect IE8 browser share to change significantly in the next couple of months?

malyk2• 12 years ago

Yep. More than 10% of our users come from IE8. I'm not about to shut them out.

chestnut-tree• 12 years ago

There's an informative talk by Alice Bartlett, a front-end developer at gov.uk (the UK government digital service) on Youtube. In the presentation, she states that two of the requirements for gov.uk are

  1. Functional without Javascript
  2. Functional in IE7+

Link to the relevant part of the talk: http://youtu.be/CUkMCQR4TpY?t=17m34s

And also http://youtu.be/CUkMCQR4TpY?t=19m21s

The essential point made is that for much of gov.uk, it isn't that difficult to make the site work without Javascript or work in IE7 either.

Purley personal opinion, but web design has become incredibly bloated with so much cruft added to web pages - be it unnecesary Javascript or excess CSS. Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.

7952• 12 years ago

Heavy use of client side methods seems to break a lot of the benefits of using web apps in the first place. A main advantage of web apps originally was that they worked more or less the same on any machine. That Google Maps worked in exactly the same way regardless of how good your machine was at vector rendering. I wonder if the aversion to maintaining state on the server needs to end. You could do almost anything that a modern web app does with minimal client side code and have performance on low end PCs.

acjohnson552• 12 years ago

If you're using IE8 still, you're probably pretty used to a broken web. For most purposes, I think developing for IE8 should basically be making sure your very basic content and functionality is available in some form. But I think it's ridiculous at this point in the game to be aiming for 100% compatibility. If someone cares enough, they'll upgrade.

minimaxir• 12 years ago

For Bootstrap 4:

Updated grid system with at least one additional tier for handheld devices.

Bootstrap already has a Mobile and Tablet layout, so which form factor would this addition address? Phablets?

LandoCalrissian2• 12 years ago

Kind of interesting, that would mean there will be 5 different sizes. I guess one between 768 and 480 or something?

joeblau• 12 years ago

Watches!

rpedela• 12 years ago

Most likely there will be two tiers for phones: landscape (480-768px) and portrait (0-480px).

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/10203

jrochkind14• 12 years ago

I often end up adding that myself already one way or another, so I hope others are in the same boat and that is what they add!

sparkzilla• 12 years ago

Maybe because the iPhone 6 has a different width than an iPhone 4?

iends• 12 years ago

Does it have RTL support yet?

joshstrange• 12 years ago

Maybe try out something like this? https://github.com/morteza/bootstrap-rtl (more info: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19730598/right-to-left-su...)

TheGuyWhoCodes• 12 years ago

Could be handy but the license is Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 so can't really use it for commercial.

ZeroGravitas• 12 years ago

They started to add it with some automated flipping tech around 3.1 but a developer of a 3rd party Bootstrap RTL project convinced them that it didn't belong in core and should be done manually. The argument made no sense to me but they scrapped their efforts shortly afterwards.

bhhaskin2• 12 years ago

I for one am happy they are dropping support for IE8.

matti3• 12 years ago

I can't believe that it has taken this long. Didn't Foundation drop IE Support like 2 versions ago?

bhhaskin2• 12 years ago

I am not sure. But they are dropping IE8 support so they can start using rems.

mVChr2• 12 years ago

Yes, dropped for v.4. Both are good frameworks and these new versions look great, but considering I prefer SASS to LESS I don't think I'll be switching back to Bootstrap any time soon.

_random_2• 12 years ago

Phew, no BootScript!

_pmf_• 12 years ago

Phew, no BootScript!

How can a JS framework expect to be taken seriously if it doesn't even provide a half-assed abstraction over a half-assed excuse for a language?

Smudge• 12 years ago

The most interesting part of this release (well, something that came shortly before this release) is Bootlint, their linter for your bootstrapified markup.

https://github.com/twbs/bootlint

I could see myself integrating something like this into a text editor or a build process -- something that watches for bootstrap usage errors and helps my team correct them early and quickly. That is, of course, assuming that we stick pretty closely to vanilla bootstrap, which we usually don't.

One of my biggest issues with Bootstrap (and similar frameworks) is that, beyond a certain point, you find yourself overriding and customizing them to such a degree that it's more productive to just build your own "vanilla" components that are specific to the way your site or organization uses them, and then just ditch Bootstrap altogether.

One thing I'd like to see is a way of generally linting HTML structure (not validity, but actual structure) with a goal of reducing complexity and improving maintainability, regardless of what frameworks you may be using. Something that spits out a ratio of meaningful, semantic markup to "div soup" and tells you where you should spend the most time mopping up the soup. It could also have some understanding of which kinds of div patterns are acceptable -- bootstrap components, your own component library (see: OOCSS), etc.

themodelplumber• 12 years ago

you find yourself overriding and customizing them to such a degree that it's more productive to just build your own "vanilla" components that are specific to the way your site or organization uses them, and then just ditch Bootstrap altogether.

This has been similar to my experience. Bootstrap can be overwhelming at times, and there have been a few cases where I had to solve buggy behavior by specific Bootstrap components by writing elaborate fixes that would not have been required had I used my own framework. From that standpoint, working on a time-consuming, yet practically throwaway-type site, Bootstrap was really frustrating.

I do really like the low-baggage approach of Initializr's Responsive configuration as well as the Responsive Grid System.

monk_e_boy• 12 years ago

For small throw away sites I tend to have getbootstrap open and using Chrome debugger cut and paste the bits off CSS I need into my own project.

Things like the nav bar are really clever, but way too much for most of my projects. I like the button styles, but usually modify them... stuff like that.

timClicks• 12 years ago

It's interesting to me that people expect that people expect Bootstrap and friends to grow to large scale projects. As implied by the name, Bootstrap's great for getting your new project off the ground. Once you're up and running though, you should have the time (and/or the team) to take care of things in-house.

obviouslygreen• 12 years ago

Why? That's a bit like saying a back end development framework is only a starting point, and you should start working outside of it as soon as your product is mature.

I don't think the name carries the explicit rejection of ongoing use that you believe it does. That you can use it to get started quickly does not mean you can't use it indefinitely; it's often necessary to tweak or hack Bootstrap to fit your specific visual requirements, but for a project that can actually use it without serious modification, I don't see a reason to throw out the convenience and consistency it provides arbitrarily, simply as a matter of course.

xpto123• 12 years ago

One of my biggest issues with Bootstrap (and similar frameworks) is that, beyond a certain point, you find yourself overriding and customizing them to such a degree that it's more productive to just build your own "vanilla" components

I think Bootstrap was meant as components ready to be used out-of-the-box as they are, but not necessarily easy to extend and customize.

I think what we need is a framework that makes components easy to create and extend, and then build a widget library on top of it that provides the most commonly needed components/UI patterns.

If the components where easy to understand and extend, then we can just look inside them, copy paste and make our own by modifying just the part that we need.

The problem is that they are not, in the case of Bootstrap these seem to be quite extended set of jQuery based components that you can spend a lot of time debugging to understand how they work, and modify them to do what we need.

brickmort• 12 years ago

This is the rhythm of the night!

wuliwong• 12 years ago

Am I the only one who actually thought that video was going to show some sort of demo for the new release? hahahah. I was actually pretty disappointed when that didn't happen.

hackerboos2• 12 years ago

I would have liked to have seen LESS support dropped. Bootstrap is the only thing keeping LESS alive right now...

aikah• 12 years ago

I dont,I prefer LESS over SASS for multiple reasons(running less in the browser during development is one).

jmathai• 12 years ago

Is there a secret I don't know about or do browsers convert LESS to CSS natively?

vlunkr2• 12 years ago

Use a pre-compiler then. Gulp is so fast you won't even notice the compilation time.

mattwad• 12 years ago

OTOH, without LESS a lot of us would have to add Ruby to our stack :p

hackerboos2• 12 years ago

https://github.com/sass/node-sass

raziel2p• 12 years ago

I use SassC: https://github.com/sass/sassc - a basic SASS/SCSS compiler written purely in C. It's not 100% up-to-date with the ruby version and you miss out on the more advanced features like custom functions, but it's blazing fast and I've never really needed more than the basic features anyway.

rayshan• 12 years ago

Less still appears to be significantly more popular than Sass (sources: github / npm stats, not perfect sources but likely directionally correct)

cheapsteak• 12 years ago

How much of that is due to Bootstrap though?

jrochkind14• 12 years ago

There is a Sass port of bootstrap that is labelled 'official' and is in the same github project as the 'canonical' less version:

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass

It's already got a 3.3.0 available, it is kept sync'd.

I have very occasionally run into a bug or problem with the sass port not being kept properly parallel to the original less, but mostly it just works fine.

sfilipov• 12 years ago

Just tried creating a Compass project with bootstrap-sass 3.3.0, ran into this problem:

https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass/pull/757

Releasing the LESS and Sass versions at the same time is a bit premature. Looks like the Sass version wasn't tested as much.

sebslomski• 12 years ago

I'm glad to see them finally switch from pixel based values to rem. This feels totally overdue to me.

ZoF• 12 years ago

I'd expect that was at least partially due to the fact that they were still supporting IE8.

vohof• 12 years ago

hear hear!

derengel• 12 years ago

Why is Bootstrap much more popular than Foundation? Is technically better for most tasks?

illicium3• 12 years ago

Probably not, but the reverse is not necessarily true. It's mostly a matter of taste -- e.g. if you don't like SASS, you won't want to use Foundation.

selamin• 12 years ago

I can't imagine that's a real deterrent is it? Using LESS with Foundation is fairly straightforward. Create an empty .less file and @import 'foundation.css'. Also, LESS and SASS have very similar syntax. There's very little learning curve if you're going from one to the other...

kyriakos• 12 years ago

as somebody who uses bootstrap with SASS instead of LESS I can tell you that my reason is simply better community support

JelteF• 12 years ago

I really don't like Foundation because of the way it looks out of the box. Everything is way to square and brightly colored. Bootstrap just looks quite good from the start. After a quick look at the markup however, I really think Foundation is winning there.

boynamedsue2• 12 years ago

It's really easy to customize the radius of things like buttons in Foundation.

jrochkind14• 12 years ago

When Bootstrap first came out, it looked way better than Foundation out of the box -- had better typography. I think that's mainly why. I think it's possible Foundation has caught up.

mtrpcic• 12 years ago

The reason I use Bootstrap over Foundation is that there is a lot more community support for it. It's much easier to find solutions to problems. Additionally, the huge number of available themes for Bootstrap make it a very compelling choice for the average dev who has terrible design skills.

wmeredith• 12 years ago

They're basically at parity now IMHO, but Bootstrap has the network effect advantage. It's got a huge community of people developing plugins, creating themes, and doing debugging on it. I've used them both in the past, but prefer Bootstrap for this reason.

hhandoko• 12 years ago

My 2c for internal / enterprise tools:

- Foundation ceases to be an option since they drop IE8 support in Foundation 3, far too soon IMHO - Various jQuery UI-based frameworks out there (e.g. Kendo UI) has good Bootstrap theme support

boynamedsue2• 12 years ago

I think Bootstrap had the benefit of being called Twitter Bootstrap during the early part of its life. That alone brought a ton of initial interest and it just continued to build from there.

lynndylanhurley• 12 years ago

I tried to use foundation on two separate occasions. Each time, basic features were broken (or completely missing!) out of the box, and when I tried to investigate, the code was so tangled and awkward that I either abandoned foundation, or implemented the feature from scratch myself.

Bootstrap is pleasant to work with and extend. Each of the javascript components are simple, isolated, and well thought out.

But don't take my word for it!

The "affix" plugin in bootstrap: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/js/affix.js

The equivalent in foundation: https://github.com/zurb/foundation/blob/master/js/foundation...

rmetzler• 12 years ago

For me it is about documentation. While Bootstrap was documented thoroughly (with the one exception of not having a transition guide for the changed grid system between 2.x and 3.0), I felt that this wasn't the point for Foundation. E.g. it was never clear for me wether off-canvas navigation was an experimental feature or not. Also scrolling the documentation doesn't feel smooth on my MBP / Chrome.

baby• 12 years ago

Foundation used to have a better grid system, better css defaults (border-box) and the "advantage" of using Sass over Less. Bootstrap just looked better since it had a theme embarked and also a nice documentation. Now Bootstrap has caught up, I haven't used Foundation in 2 years but I would think they're still relevant.

elchief• 12 years ago

Please add the "clear" button back on input type=search! Thanks

sandeshd• 12 years ago

It's too late to see rems and ems in bootstrap, but it's most welcome feature I guess.

maga• 12 years ago

Speaking of dropping IE8, folks, is there a CSS framework for modern browsers that preferably support only IE10+?

Bootstrap 3.3.0 and Bootstrap 4

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