The official 1.3.0 documentation was posted this weekend as well and is also available from the downloads link above, or this Google Code download page.

Keep your eyes peeled for a jQuery 1.3.2 release anytime in the next few days as John Resig has mentioned there is still one last 1.3 regression they are working on fixing.

For those interested, the regression has to do with the $(document).ready() function waiting until images are fully loaded in Internet Explorer 6 & 7. The jQuery bug ticket ID is #3988 and here’s a Stack Overflow question in which John Resig talks about the issue in some detail.

The blog post regarding this release makes a few important points to be aware of:

• jQuery support for Safari 2 is being phased out. 
  • Safari 2 has been superceded by Safari 3 and no longer has an appreciable market share.
• Packed versions of jQuery will no longer be available.
  • Packed scripts make debugging more difficult, cause platform incompatibilities (e.g. Adobe Air, Caja), and can actually increase loading times in many cases versus a plain minified script.

This update should not contain any breaking changes. Happy jQuerying!

Happy jQuerying!

I blogged previously about this release and the performance enhancements it’s expected to bring, but the release notes spell out in detail the performance differences of the new selector engine.

Along with this release, jQuery has created a new API Browser at http://api.jquery.com that is available in addition to the existing jQuery docs site. Whats nice about the new api browser is it can be downloaded and installed as an Adobe Air application.

Happy birthday jQuery!

/// <reference path="MyIntellisenseFile.js" />

However, if you needed intellisense in an ASP.Net page, you needed to add the reference to the intellisense file in a server tag that would prevent it from being sent to the client, usually by wrapping the script reference tag like this:

<% if(false) { %>
<script src="MyIntellisenseFile.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<% } %>

Unbeknowst to me, Last November the VS Web Tools team released a hotfix to VS 2008 SP1 that alleviates a lot of this trouble. Now all you have to do is just reference the jQuery library and have the intelisense file in the same directory following the naming convention of filename-vsdoc.js (e.g. if your jQuery file is named jQuery.js, your intellisense file would be named jQuery-vsdoc.js) and Visual Studio will automatically find the file and provide you with intellisense support. No more conditional ASP.Net server tags. Woo! The VS 2008 hotfix is currently available on the MSDN Code Gallery.

If you’re looking for the official Visual Studio intellisense file for jQuery, you can grab it from the jQuery downloads page (It’s found in the Current Release section). Thanks to Joe Healy for pointing out to me that there was an official version.

John Resig mentioned in a podcast with Scott Hanselman a few months back that one of the primary goals of the 1.3 release was to increase performance and a quick glance at the important changes listd in this release, specifically rewrites of big parts JQuery like the selector engine, seem to allude to this.

A quick run of the Javascript library benchmark app at http://experiment.bcse.info/slickspeed/ on my machine using Chrome shows a *significant* performance increase in JQuery 1.3b1 versus 1.2.6 (final time of 13ms compared to 26ms, so about a 100% speedup overall).