Ten years ago, on August 19, 2011, the first version of Bootstrap was released and announced to be open source on GitHub. At the time, it was positioned as “a front-end toolkit for rapid web application development,” bringing together common uses of CSS and HTML with some of the latest browser technologies to provide developers with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and other needed components.

Ten years later, Bootstrap is one of the most widely used open source projects and front-end toolkits on the Web. the Bootstrap team has compiled a list of some of the milestones about Bootstrap in the last decade.

  • Bootstrap has over 2.5 billion document views (PV), with over 685,000 PVs per day
  • Since 2015, Bootstrap has had 394,000,000 npm downloads, including over 131 million downloads in 2020 alone. Over the past six years, downloads have averaged 180,000 per day
  • 50 million downloads at RubyGems
  • 57 million downloads at NuGet
  • 7.5 million installs via Packagist
  • Used by more than 22% of all websites on the web
  • Used by 2.7 million projects on GitHub
  • Over 21,100 commits on GitHub, including nearly 35,000 issues and PRs

Bootstrap’s founder laughs that in early 2011 he and his co-founder Jacob were just two “nerds” working at Twitter, Jacob as the engineer in charge of internal tools and himself as the product designer in charge of advertising. The two founders crossed paths when the project he was working on required its own internal tools application to manage Twitter ad campaigns. Over the course of a few months, they began to collaborate frequently and eventually decided to release their project to the world.

To this day, a decade later, Bootstrap’s founders still see themselves as just a few “nerds” getting together to do what they love, contribute to open source, and make an impact on people’s lives through their work. He believes that from rewriting major features to implementing new ones, from a growing icon library to a mature market. It’s been an incredible journey and one that continues thanks to the love of the community and the support of maintainers over the years.

The latest version of Bootstrap is currently Bootstrap 5.1.0, released earlier this month.