jQuery Mobile beta 3 released

The jQuery Mobile developers have released Beta 3 of the mobile version of the jQuery framework which they describe as feature complete.The schedule aims to have a first release candidate for version 1.0 available by the end of the month.

In this final beta, the developers have improved support for pushState, which allows Ajax applications to encode their state in the URL. The pushState mechanism uses history.replaceState() on more recent browsers, which results in cleaner URLs without added "#" marks. Improved pagebeforechange and pagechange events (previously beforechangepage and changepage) allow developers to hook into dynamic pages as they load or transition to override behaviour. With Apple's iOS5 due soon, the jQuery Mobile developers have added enhancements which make fixed toolbars, headers and footers and native momentum scrolling easily accessible.

One change that is being deferred until after the release of 1.0 is a switch from keyframe-based animation to CSS transition-based animation. "The switch to transitions isn't the panacea we'd hoped", say the developers who are shelving the code to wait until mobile browsers such as Firefox Mobile and Opera Mobile handle CSS transitions better.

As of beta 3, jQuery Mobile now offer's "A-grade" support on Apple iOS 3.2-5.0 beta, Android 2.1-2.3, Android Honeycomb, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry 6,7 and Playbook, Palm WebOS 1.4-2.0 and 3.0, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile and Kindle 3, along with the desktop versions of Chrome 11-13, Firefox 3.6-4.0, Internet Explorer 7-9 and Opera 10-11.

The release notes are included in the announcement along with links to CDN-hosted versions of the JavaScript and CSS, and a zip file(direct download) of all the required files. jQuery mobile is dual licensed under the GPLv2 and MIT licences.

(djwm)