Today we tagged the first public release candidate of Prototype 1.6.1. (What happened to RC1? Long story.) While there are more minor fixes we’d like to get into this release, we decided an interim release was necessary because of the final release of Internet Explorer 8 last week.

This is the first public release of Prototype that is fully compatible — and fully optimized for — Internet Explorer 8’s “super-standards” mode. In particular, Prototype now takes advantage of IE8’s support of the Selectors API and its ability to extend the prototypes of DOM elements.

What’s new?

  • Full compatibility with Internet Explorer 8. Juriy has spearheaded the effort to replace most of our IE “sniffs” into outright capability checks — making it far easier to support IE8 in both “super-standards” mode and compatibility mode.
  • Element storage, a feature announced previously. Safely associate complex metadata with individual elements.
  • mouseenter and mouseleave events — simulating the IE-proprietary events that tend to be far more useful than mouseover and mouseout.
  • An Element#clone method for cloning DOM nodes in a way that lets you perform “cleanup” on the new copies.

What’s been improved?

  • Better housekeeping on event handlers in order to prevent memory leaks.
  • Better performance in Function#bind, Element#down, and a number of other often-used methods.
  • A number of bug fixes.

Consult the CHANGELOG for more details.

In addition to the code itself, the 1.6.1 release features Prototype’s embrace of two other excellent projects we’ve been working on: Sprockets (JavaScript concatenation) and PDoc (inline documentation). Sprockets is now used to “build” Prototype into a single file for distribution. PDoc will be the way we document the framework from now on. The official API docs aren’t quite ready yet, but they’ll be ready for the final release of 1.6.1.

Download, Report Bugs, and Get Help

Thanks to the many contributors who made this release possible!

Comments

  1. Radoslav Stankov #

    Great news :) I really love the the storage engine. 10x

    March 27th, 2009 @ 07:48 PM
  2. Mislav #

    Element storage and mouseenter/leave—simply wow! Great to see it got in at last

    March 27th, 2009 @ 08:05 PM
  3. feng #

    Thank you for work!

    March 28th, 2009 @ 08:52 AM
  4. Pablo #

    Will you update the prototype API docs to include these new features (specially Storage). If not, could you point a nice tutorial/post where it explains how to use them…

    I’m maybe between the newbie and the wizard who can completely understand the source code, and I believe there are many in this situation.

    Thanks for the excellent work!

    Pablo Fernandez

    March 28th, 2009 @ 10:22 AM
  5. Joran #

    Thanks everyone. Good work! Keep it up! Go go go!

    March 29th, 2009 @ 05:48 AM
  6. Vladimir Tkach #

    Great news :) Thank you for work

    March 29th, 2009 @ 10:06 AM
  7. Tarun Ghosh #

    I was using it from long before. But as IE8 launches, i find a heavy problem… just stopping my site from working caused by the following code var divs= $$(‘div [class=”error”]’) by which i was accessing all divs with class=’error’. In all other browsers except IE8, this is working fine. I tried with 1.6.1_rc2 version and found working fine for IE8 also. I had to change the version to “1.6.0” as i was using ScriptAculo also. But i fear whethere this will break any other existing functionality as this version is RC2 not realsed finally. Please let me know when are you plaaning to release this version.

    March 30th, 2009 @ 03:31 AM
  8. Radoslav Stankov #

    @Tarun why don’t you use $$(‘div.error’) ?

    March 30th, 2009 @ 06:18 AM
  9. Ashwin Raj #

    Tarun, I have the same issue with IE8 and Prototype 1.6 final (not the RC2 release).

    Radoslav, I suppose I could use $$(‘div.error’) in some places, but my selectors go beyond that sometimes, like $$(‘div[class*=odd]’), etc. So I am stuck waiting for a final release that addresses this problem.

    Thanks.

    Ashwin

    March 30th, 2009 @ 01:39 PM
  10. rates #

    Congrats! IE8 is still evil..

    March 30th, 2009 @ 09:33 PM
  11. Radek Tetik #

    Great news! Now as jQuery is in the spotlight, it’s good to hear Prototype is being actively developed. My whole existence depends on it :-)

    March 31st, 2009 @ 05:34 AM
  12. sahid #

    thank for this release !

    March 31st, 2009 @ 07:58 AM
  13. Alex #

    Does this RC2 has any side effect on scriptaculous ? I checked their website and found no trace of errors mentioned on it with IE8.

    April 1st, 2009 @ 07:05 AM
  14. Andrew #

    Thank you thank you! When I tested IE8 on our site, I almost had a heart attack. When I installed RC2, I had like 1-2 simple fixes and then we were fully 8.0 compatible.

    April 1st, 2009 @ 01:48 PM
  15. Reginald Mullin #

    I’d like to see an addon/plugin section added to prototypejs.org website so that there’s a centralized location for this info. All of the other libraries seem to have this setup.

    April 1st, 2009 @ 02:07 PM
  16. jake hoffner #

    Object.isString is now broken. Sorry… didnt feel like registering for the bug tracker system.

    April 1st, 2009 @ 03:11 PM
  17. Ulanhad #

    I am Chinese!So Love Your Works.

    I just to say THANK YOU!

    April 4th, 2009 @ 02:06 AM
  18. Fabrice #

    Thanks guys, awesome work! Really happy about mouseenter/mouseleave.

    April 5th, 2009 @ 02:56 PM
  19. Rob #

    Great! Thanks for all your hard work. Any word on whether this is compatible with the latest scriptaculous lib?

    April 6th, 2009 @ 10:59 PM
  20. Joe Wall #

    There is a strange bug that doesn’t allow unicode in firefox. I can’t seem pass unicode over AJAX using a textarea.

    April 7th, 2009 @ 12:04 AM
  21. Yair Leviel #

    Is there an expected release date for the fixes made in RC2?

    April 15th, 2009 @ 09:26 AM
  22. Skaurus #

    Cool :) Will Sizzle make it into 1.6.1?

    April 15th, 2009 @ 10:24 AM
  23. Laurent #

    Thanks to the Prototype core team for the great job!

    @Skaurus: as fast as Sizzle can be, here is a good competitor: Sly.

    http://github.com/digitarald/sly/tree/master

    April 15th, 2009 @ 02:54 PM
  24. symmiler #

    Someone integrated “Sly” with Prototype.js http://twitter.com/kangax/status/1491820426

    Quoting http://firejune.com/1398 : <prototype sly on is> Shows an integration of Sly with minimal changes and maximal profit. http://twitter.com/digitarald/status/1503835345

    April 16th, 2009 @ 01:34 PM
  25. Philippe Marechal #

    Thanks to the team. Prototype deserves 5 stars !

    April 17th, 2009 @ 06:45 AM
  26. nours312 #

    hello :

    Bug with IE8 function element.relativize() lines prototype : element.style.height = element._originalHeight; element.style.width = element._originalWidth;

    Détails de l’erreur de la page Web

    Agent utilisateur : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30618) Horodateur : Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:30:38 UTC

    Message : Argument non valide. Ligne : 2392 Caractère : 5 Code : 0 URI : http://js.gd-en.com/s/lib/prototype1-61RC2.js

    April 24th, 2009 @ 08:33 AM
  27. Rommel Samanez #

    Muchas Gracias por el Update, siempre es un gusto poder contar con el apoyo del equipo de desarrollo de Prototype.

    April 24th, 2009 @ 09:14 AM
  28. Mr. L #

    document.viewport.getDimensions() has a bug in IE. It always return {width: 0, height: 0}

    April 24th, 2009 @ 10:58 PM
  29. Tobie Langel #

    @ nours312, Mr. L, jake hoffner, Joe Wall… Please, submit bug reports to our bug tracker. Thank you!

    April 25th, 2009 @ 02:38 PM

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

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