jQuery 3.0 is officially out. It is a continuation of the 2.x branch, but with a few breaking changes. While the 1.12 and 2.2 branches will continue to receive critical support patches for a time, they will not get any new features or major revisions. The 1.12 branch is the release that is included in WordPress core, and if you need IE6-8 support for your non-WordPress projects you would use the same branch.
They’ve also released a “slim” build. “The size of jQuery is very rarely a load performance concern these days, but the slim build is about 6k gzipped bytes smaller than the regular version – 23.6k vs 30k.”
