Is bootstrap4 obsolete?

Bootstrap was once the most popular CSS framework for people to get started with the front-end. Many back-end programmers also often use it in their side projects to build project homepages, demos, etc.

After three years of development, the front-end framework Bootstrap 4 has been officially released. However, today's Web world is very different from when Mark Otto released Bootstrap, and some developers have questioned whether its updates are still meaningful.

Main updates for the V4 version are:

Improved grid system (Flexbox by default)

Now uses Sass (replaced Less)

IE8, IE9 and iOS 6 are not supported

Rewrite JavaScript plug-in

Now uses rem instead of px.

Related recommendations: "Front-end Development Questions and Answers"

Developers who are preparing to upgrade from the V3 version need to do testing first and may need to solve some problems. The new version is generally close to the old version, but has some breakthrough changes. The following migration guide lists the details of what has changed:

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/migration/#by-component

One of the strengths of Bootstrap is its web grid system. This system provides a declarative way for web pages to render content in a grid system, making streaming content compatible with desktop and mobile devices without requiring additional steps.

Bootstrap 4’s grid system uses flexbox, which is supported by almost all modern browsers. Due to the introduction of this update and other reasons, the new version only supports IE10 and above and iOS7 and above. If the project still needs to be compatible with older browsers, developers will continue to use Bootstrap 3. However, Bootstrap 3 maintenance ended in 2016.

Bootstrap was originally released in 2011 as a product of Twitter and was billed as "the world's most popular HTML, CSS and JS library", but its growth trend seems to have come to an end. Dan Tao and others have criticized Boostrap for its tight coupling and lack of semantic flaws:

What seemed like a great bunch of development components at first has now evolved into a mountain of technical debt. Developers' HTML is filled with deeply nested structures with Bootstrap-specific attributes.

The first alpha version of V4 was released in August 2015, with the first beta version released two years later. But is Bootstrap 4 born at the wrong time? Its grid system is one of the biggest selling points, but the widespread adoption of CSS grids by mainstream browsers means that the flexbox-based grid newly introduced in Bootstrap 4 is outdated.

Natalya Shelburne, a software engineer at The New York Times, thinks CSS Grid is the future:

CSS Grid is not a hacker tool, it’s a great web layout tool. There’s nothing to install, no preprocessors, and no brain-braining to understand how it works.

In addition, Ryan Oglesby believes that using component-based styling techniques (such as those often used with React or Vue.js), there is no need for traditional "global CSS" techniques:

With the help of UI libraries such as React or Vue.js, modern web application architecture has adopted loosely coupled, highly cohesive components that often put HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the same file.

Of course, if developers want to make something beautiful and fast-running, Bootstrap's JavaScript plug-ins (such as Popover and Form controls) are still the preferred framework.

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