Programming & AI

Bootstrap 6: first alpha after a five-year break

After five years, Bootstrap is finally moving again: co-founder Mark Otto has announced the first alpha of Bootstrap 6, as reported by heise developer. I find this exciting, because the framework came out of the Twitter environment and has been open source since 2011.

The numbers show how big Bootstrap has become: more than 1.75 billion installations according to the project. At the same time, its market share is falling. According to W3Techs, 13.8 percent of all websites used Bootstrap in early August 2026, down from 15.3 percent in December 2025. Tailwind CSS is gaining ground in new projects.

The team is targeting modern browsers: Chrome and Edge from version 130, Firefox from 132, and Safari from 18. To do this, Bootstrap 6 uses features such as automatic light/dark switching, native dialogs, and layouts that align to surrounding elements rather than to the window. Colors, spacing, and corner radii can largely be controlled through CSS variables, including at runtime. The class names follow Tailwind's approach: .d-md-none becomes .md:d-none, and .col-lg-6 becomes .lg:col-6. Accordions work without JavaScript.

What I find especially remarkable is the AI part: the documentation is available as llms.txt and llms-full.txt, and the repository contains skill files meant to help AI agents, for example with migration.

According to the article, existing pages cannot simply be switched over. Bootstrap 5 will continue to be supported for now, and before its end of support there will be an update to 5.4.0. Version 7 is expected to follow much faster. Which of you still use Bootstrap, and who has already switched to something else?

Source: heise online

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