January 2026 – Hot New Web Dev

Happy New Year and welcome to Hot Web Dev January 2026, featuring the latest technology, web development news and articles. This month features a new release in a 20-year-old JavaScript library. The tool of the month is a magical tool that connects all of your devices without having to do complex setups.

jQuery 4 Released

JQuery is far from dead. To mark its 20th anniversary, version 4.0 has been released.
The first major release in nearly a decade brings improvements and modernisations. It includes breaking changes, such as trimming legacy code and removing deprecated APIs, so users should review the details before upgrading.

jQuery drops support for IE 10 and older, Edge Legacy, older iOS, Firefox versions, and Android Browser. Plans to remove support for IE 11 will be implemented in jQuery 5.0. jQuery 4.0 aligns the order of focus and blur events with the W3C spec, breaking from its previous consistent order.

Source

jQuery Blog

Learning Resources

Bash (short for Bourne Again SHell) is the default shell on most Linux systems. A Bash script is just a text file with commands you’d normally type into the terminal, saved and run as a program. Learn more about bash with this introduction to bash scripting.

CSS has become more complex over the past decade. This is partly due to the rise of frameworks like Bulma and Bootstrap and the growing popularity of Tailwind, which reduces the need for native CSS. Mastering CSS Grid and Flexbox for layout creation can be challenging. Polypane has written an informative article delving into the fundamentals of CSS layout.

Coding & Web Design News & Resources

Cloudflare is partnering with the Astro team to enhance the web framework for content-driven websites. The upcoming Astro 6 release will feature a redesigned development server powered by Vite.

Astro will remain open source and continue to be supported by Cloudflare and industry partners. The Astro Technology Company employees are now Cloudflare employees and will continue working on Astro.

Dev Meets Devs is a website that offers inspiration for web components and pages. It’s great for finding ideas for headers, footers, navigation, FAQ pages and even more.

Nuxt Studio is now an open-source module that allows content editors to manage content directly in production without local tools or Git knowledge. It is self-hosted, has no external dependencies, is free and open-source, and integrates with Nuxt apps.

ReliCSS is a “CSS hack” detection tool that helps developers identify and replace outdated browser-specific hacks with modern standards-compliant alternatives. This will be very handy if you are running an old website.

WOW Tool Of The Month

Tailscale is like a magical, invisible tunnel that connects all your computers, phones, and devices into one private, secure club. Even if they are far apart (like your desktop at home and your Mac at work), Tailscale makes them act like they are plugged into the same box right next to each other. Tailscale is easy to set up, without having to change complicated router settings or port-forwarding, for example.

Use cases include accessing your smart devices and media streaming services at home. File sharing and accessing for a family member’s device for troubleshooting. For developers, you can access a development server or connect directly to internal databases.

Tailscale is free for personal use, allowing 3 users and 100 devices to access most features. If you require more resources, there’s a premium personal plan available for $5. Business use starts at $6.

Must-Read Resources From January 2026

• Why the Frontend Should Embrace Platform Engineering
• The Future of the Software Engineering Career
• Rethinking “Pixel Perfect” Web Design
• Laravel: Why It’s Perfect
• Web Development Is More Than Just Frontend and Backend