Features: What’s New in Bootstrap 3

Bootstrap, the highly popular front-end framework originally built at Twitter by @mdo and @fat has grown into an indispensable tool for scores of developers, and while it’s a tool for rapid prototyping, it’s also on the front end of thousands of production websites.

Two years after the initial release, Bootstrap 3.0 was released with lots of new features. There are some solid overhauls in the layout and grid system, typefaces, tables, images, buttons, forms, icons, navigation and in the customize.

Features: What’s New in Bootstrap 3

Here are some of the new features and things to keep in mind when working with Bootstrap 3.

A new flat theme.
While the framework could be used on mobile devices since 2.0, now it has been targeted for them, but it can also run on larger screens due to responsive design which scales the interface depending on the screen size.
In this release, Bootstrap follows the mobile-first approach and makes your site always responsive by default. Responsive design can be turned off if desired.
New powerful grid system. The new grid is significantly simplified and combined into one single grid system: the separate fluid grid system, container, and layout are removed, as they’re down to one grid. It’s now one responsive, mobile-first, fluid grid system that appropriately scales up to 12 columns as the device or viewport size increases. And the four tiers of grid classes – phones, tablets, desktops, and large desktops – allow you to create complex and adaptive layouts with ease.
New components: panel, list group, collapsible panel.
Deprecated components: accordion, dropdown submenu, typeahead, search form
New browser-based library customizer
New glyphicons The icons which were images in version 2.x, are now in font format and include 40 new glyphs. This makes total of 180 glyphs in font format from the Glyphicon Halflings set.
JavaScript plugins are rewritten and all events are now namespaced to prevent any conflicts that may occur.
Brand new customizer. Now the customizer can save your customizations to an anonymous Gist for easy reuse, sharing, and modifications. It’s been redesigned, is now compiled in the browser instead of Heroku, has better dependency support, and even has built-in error handling.
Smallest file size. With the changes made in this release a reduction of over 20% is achieved in the minified CSS file.
Dropped Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6 support.
Extended documentation. A lot of new documentation is added, not only for the components, but also for browser support (including gotchas and bugs), third party support (and workarounds), license FAQs, accessibility. Also you can find a section with best practices for customizing Bootstrap. Plus how to migrate from version 2.x to 3.0 and how to disable responsiveness.
Updated and new examples. There are new examples added and also one for the Bootstrap’s optional theme.
New Bootstrap showcase. If you are curious about what can be done with Bootstrap, you can visit the new Bootstrap Expo website. It’s a web gallery where you can find a collection of different websites built with Bootstrap.