What's New 2026 Q2

What's New 2026 Q2

Compact Choice Selection with the New Kendo UI for jQuery Segmented Control

The new jQuery SegmentedControl is a sleek, space-efficient component for fast, mutually exclusive selection between related options. Designed as a modern alternative to radio buttons and tabs, it improves usability by surfacing key choices in a single, intuitive control. With built-in support for icons, customization, accessibility, and responsive behavior, it fits seamlessly into any Kendo UI application.

See the Kendo UI for jQuery Segmented Control demo

Enhanced jQuery Grid Productivity: CSV Export, Sticky Groups, and Row Pinning

The Kendo UI for jQuery Grid introduces several enhancements focused on data access and usability.

• CSV Export: Provide a straightforward way to extract and download data in a lightweight, widely compatible format. This makes it easier to integrate with external tools and workflows that rely on plain text data processing.
• Sticky Group Headers and Footers: Grouped rows remain clearly identifiable as users scroll through the Grid. This feature always keeps the current group context visible, improving navigation and readability when working with large, grouped datasets.
• Row Pinning: Allow users to fix specific rows at the top or bottom of the component. This is especially useful for keeping important or frequently referenced records in view while interacting with the rest of the data.

jQuery Chat: Rich Message Rendering with Adornments, Markdown, and Charts

The Kendo UI for jQuery Chat expands its message visualization capabilities with support for adornments, Markdown visualization, and charts visualization.

Adornments allow you to enrich messages with additional structured content, while Markdown support enables formatted text rendering directly in messages. The new charts visualization option lets you display data-driven insights inline, making conversations more interactive and informative.

jQuery Chat: Suggestions, Auto-Scroll Control, and Endless Scrolling

Enhance user interaction with built-in suggestions, enabling predefined quick replies for faster communication. The new autoScrollThreshold option gives you control over when the Kendo UI for jQuery Chat automatically scrolls to new messages, improving usability in active conversations. Additionally, endless scrolling allows efficient loading of large message histories on demand, ensuring smooth performance with growing datasets.

jQuery Chat: Greater Flexibility with Templates and Per-User Settings

The Kendo UI for jQuery Chat now offers extended customization through templates, allowing full control over message and UI rendering. With per-user settings, you can configure the Chat behavior and appearance individually for each participant, enabling more personalized and adaptable conversational experiences.

Enhanced Kendo UI for jQuery Diagram Interactivity with Connections and Tooltips

The Kendo UI for jQuery Diagram extends its capabilities with improved connections configuration, allowing you to define and customize links between shapes, including their routing, appearance, and behavior. This provides greater control over how relationships between diagram elements are visualized and managed.

In addition, tooltips can now be configured for diagram shapes and connections, enabling contextual information to be displayed on hover for improved usability and clarity.

The Diagram also supports keyboard navigation, allowing users to interact with the diagram elements using standard keyboard shortcuts for better accessibility.

Integrated AI Chat in Telerik and Kendo UI Documentation

Telerik and Kendo UI documentation pages now support an integrated AI Chat, allowing you to easily ask questions and receive instant, context-aware answers directly within the page. The assistant helps you quickly locate relevant information, understand features, and explore related topics without interrupting your workflow. By combining search and conversational guidance, it streamlines navigation and improves productivity when working with components and APIs.

New Healthcare Sample App with Built-In AI Assistant in Kendo UI for jQuery

A new Healthcare Management sample application is now available, showcasing how to build a complete, real-world jQuery app with Kendo UI components, enhanced with an integrated AI chat assistant. 

The app brings together dashboards, scheduling, patient data, and real-time alerts in a cohesive interface, while also demonstrating how AI can assist users directly. 

See the Kendo UI for jQuery healthcare sample app 

Build Modern UI with a New Meridian Theme and Updated Icons

This release brings a refreshed visual foundation by combining the new Meridian theme with an updated and streamlined icons set, helping you create cleaner, more consistent, and modern user interfaces.

The Meridian theme introduces a refined design language with improved colors, spacing, and visual hierarchy, while the updated icons complement it with a more cohesive and flexible set of visuals.

What's New 2026 Q1

jQuery PromptBox: Enhanced Prompt Input Experience

The new Kendo UI for jQuery PromptBox component provides a dedicated input area for composing and sending prompts to AI models. It adapts to different prompt lengths with flexible sizing options and supports file attachments, speech-to-text button and input adornments, making it easy to build rich, conversational AI experiences.

See the Kendo UI for jQuery PromptBox demo

jQuery SmartPasteButton: Effortless Input Filling

The new Kendo UI for jQuery SmartPasteButton lets users paste unstructured text, e.g. an email signature, message, or snippet, and convert it into structured data. The component sends the pasted content to an AI service, interprets the information, and automatically fills in the matching input fields. This eliminates repetitive copy‑and‑paste steps and makes data entry faster, cleaner, and more intuitive.

See the Kendo UI for jQuery SmartPasteButton demo

jQuery Smart Grid: Semantic Search Built into a SmartBox

The Kendo UI for jQuery DataGrid introduces AI Semantic Search – a meaning‑based way to find what you need, even when keywords don’t match exactly. Instead of relying on exact text, Semantic Search understands intent and context, surfacing the most relevant rows across columns and related fields. It’s ideal for large datasets where users might not know the precise terms or spelling.

Complementing this, the new AI Smart Box provides a single, streamlined place to run Semantic Search and ask AI‑assisted questions. Users can search by meaning, then immediately refine, filter, or ask follow‑up questions within the same interface.

jQuery Smart Grid – AI Chat Integration

The Kendo UI for jQuery Grid now integrates seamlessly with the jQuery AI Chat capabilities, giving users a conversational way to explore and interact with Grid data. Instead of relying on manual filtering and navigation only, users can ask natural‑language questions that the Chat Assistant interprets using the Grid’s schema, context, and current view. This makes data discovery faster, more intuitive, and accessible even to users who are unfamiliar with the underlying structure of the dataset.

See the Kendo UI for jQuery Grid-Chat integration demo

Refined jQuery Chat for a Cleaner, More Intuitive UI

The Kendo UI for jQuery Chat component receives a series of visual and usability enhancements that make chat conversations clearer, more polished, and easier to follow. Message metadata now aligns cleanly on a single line with status indicators, and the header has been modernized by replacing the AppBar with the Toolbar component for a more consistent look and feel. The Chat also adopts the new PromptBox control for a richer prompt‑input experience, while attachment menus and download buttons have been refined with a smaller visual footprint. Pinned messages now stay sticky for better visibility, and suggestion lists introduce new scroll buttons with gradient styling for smoother browsing.

More Precise Diagramming in Kendo UI for jQuery

The Diagram now offers more interactive editing experience with connector text, tooltips, and improved connection handling through larger grab points, resizable segments, and better snapping. Users also benefit from dynamic scrollbars, full keyboard navigation, and resizable shapes, making diagram creation smoother and more flexible than ever.

See the Kendo UI for jQuery Diagram revamped demo

Kendo UI for jQuery: 4.0.0 Support

After almost a decade, jQuery 4.0.0 has arrived, removing legacy browser support, dropping deprecated APIs, aligning event behavior with modern standards and overall modernizing the codebase. Kendo UI for jQuery is fully compatible and ready for jQuery 4.