I didn’t know bridgeSlide, but it appears to be using jQuery animations… so I’d rather advise against this one (jQuery animations are bad because they are constantly doing rapid layout thrashing, which can be quite a performance killer). Owl carousel OTOH uses CSS transitions + transforms under the hood; not only does this prevent layout thrashing, it can even take advantage of hardware acceleration. That’s the way to go. :-) Also like you said, it’s battle-tested… so Owl carousel is certainly a safe bet.
FWIW when I was evaluating some sliders a while a go I found this one quite promising:
It’s around 50kb like yours, but doesn’t depend on jQuery* and uses CSS transitions too. It also looks pretty versatile.
*) Edit: Ah scratch that. It does depend on jQuery. :-/
Uses CSS3 when available. Fully functional when not.
so what would you suggest using this one? I mean the one that you have recommended or go with the old one that is older and more established? the one that you have given seems to have the advantage that it is lightweight.
JQuery is also javascript. Right? so JQuery is bad in general and reduces page speeds?
JQuery is JavaScript, it’s a library that helps with a lot of the difficulties JavaScript beginners may encounter, by normalizing the different behaviours between browsers and providing standard methods. The bad part of it is that if you abuse it, it may prevent you from properly learning JavaScript as it has a lot of methods which are IMHO redundant to JavaScript. Of course knowing the raw technology is more difficult but it also grants you more power… The thing is jQuery used to be a lot more useful but these days JavaScript has evolved a lot and the main reasons jQuery became popular are no longer really relevant. jQuery became famous mainly because it used to be quite hard to select elements from the dom, which jQuery made easy through another library it used called Sizzle; but JavaScript ‘recently’ introduced querySelector and querySelectorAll making that case obsolete (notice the ‘query’ bit in jQuery?). Of course jQuery can still have a place… but raw JavaScript, once you can get around with it is a lot more valuable… You’ll have full control over what you’re doing… instead of calling jQuery methods that do a lot of stuff under the hood which you may be unaware of and don’t have control over…
jQuery is not bad per se – as @Andres_Vaquero says, it’s just pretty much obsolete these days. The only outright bad part are the animations (unless you want to target legacy browsers); the jQuery team is aware of this and introduced a “slim” build starting with version 3, which leaves out animations (among other things) for this reason. And you can always apply CSS animations with jQuery too, as do both slick and owl.
Now if you’re using jQuery anyway on your page that’s not a problem, but personally I’d hesitate to introduce such a comparably heavy dependency just for a slider that could just as well have been written with vanilla JS.
Well naturally, it does increase the page load. Apart from that I think the overhead it creates is neglectable compared to using the native DOM API… when used correctly that is. The brevity of the $() function tends to lead people to use it thoughtlessly and perform lots of redundant DOM queries, but that shouldn’t concern you when using an established 3rd party library.
Well given that slick depends on jQuery too, I don’t think there’s much point in using it. Owl has almost exactly the same size, and again it’s tried and (literally) tested. But if you’re not using jQuery anyway I’d rather look for a dependency-free solution.
BTW just to clarify, I only said that slick looked promising – I didn’t end up using it. Otherwise I might (hopefully) have noticed the dependency earlier. :-P Anyway I can’t really judge how it performs in the wild, how developer developer-friendly it is etc.