Know About the Latest Magento 2.4.4 Features & Upgrades

Introduction

The whole world of eCommerce had its eyes on 12th April 2022, when Adobe released the latest Magento 2.4.4 version after releasing its Beta version back in October 2021. It was quite an astonishing day for tech geeks, eCommerce business owners (who had their online stores built with Magento), and top Magento development services providers.

The official release of the newest Magento version 2.4.4 was a highly anticipated event as it was believed to present merely a minor version upgrade over 2.4.3.

So what’s the catch?

Well, despite fostering a minor version upgrade from 2.4.3, the latest version was believed to bring a massive set of updates in terms of performance, around 250 quality fixes, and other enhancements.

Before jumping into the mix, have a look at the popularity of the PHP-powered Magento framework in the eCommerce space:

Why do Global Brands Choose & Use Magento?

Magento is an eCommerce platform with in-built PHP that was developed back in 2008. And soon it became a preferred choice due to its robust platform with in-built rich snippets, improved performance, and page caching.

• Big fishes and global brands like HP Inc, Nike, Jack Daniels, Land Rover, Liverpool FC, Pepe Jeans, Coca Cola, Olympus, Nestle, etc. have used Magento and experienced a great boost in terms of traffic, streamlined processes, and revenue.
• Magento has been considered the most popular eCommerce platform of 2021 and among the top 10 eCommerce platforms to build an online store or a custom marketplace application.
• 3500+ Magento extensions are available to extend eCommerce system functionalities for B2B, B2C, and C2C software applications.
• Magento is trusted in terms of stability, scalability, good value for money, security, and performance as it handles more than 155 billion transactions per year. And this number is growing with every passing day.
• About 1.2% of the Internet uses Magento, which accounts for 12% of all eCommerce sites. This number is likely to grow as the Magento platform adoption/migration rate doubled in 2017-2018. Since then, it never looked back.
• Magento 2 empowered eCommerce entrepreneurs, established enterprises, and retail owners to bring their ideas to life with unparalleled flexibility and next-gen architecture to develop great shopping experiences.

I hope it now makes a bit sense to jump into knowing the features and upgrades offered by Magento 2.4.4 version. So let’s get started!

PHP 8.1 Support = Faster & Improved Performance

The complete compatibility of Magento 2.4.4 with the latest PHP 8.1 has proven to be a match made in heaven for Magento development practitioners.

The release of Magento 2.4.4 was delayed a bit to ensure alignment with the latest PHP version too. After a comprehensive testing process, Adobe finally claims full functional support of PHP 8.1 for the latest Magento 2.4.4 release. While all the libraries and dependencies in the PHP 8.1 have been updated to make them compatible with the third-party libraries.

Hereby, I have tried to list the new features of PHP 8.1 below:

• Enumerations
• Fibers
• The ‘never’ Return Type
• The ‘readonly’ Property
• Final Class Constants
• New ‘array_is_list()’ Function
• New ‘fsync()’ and ‘fdatasync()’ Functions
• Array Unpacking Support for String-keyed Arrays
• New ‘full-path’ Key in ‘$_FILES’ for Directory Uploads
• New ‘IntlDatePatternGenerator’ Class

PHP 8.1 Performance Tests & Results

Along with the aforementioned new features, the overall speed and performance upgrades have been experienced as massive. Noted speed improvements of 23% while using PHP 8.1 in Symfony Demo guarantees faster response times. Even the performance tests for PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.1 conducted on Magento showed that the latter stood out to be faster.

Though it also depends on various factors, server CPU, its architecture (x86/ARM), hosting environment, installed extensions, executed Cron jobs, etc.

In a Nutshell: More speed and performance guaranteed.

OpenSearch Support

OpenSearch is an open source search and analytics suite that will be the default search engine for Magento 2.4.4 cloud-based deployments.

Magento 2.4.4 supports Elasticsearch 7.16 and OpenSearch 1.2. This is excellent news for eCommere application developers who need to create a search function using the Document Object Model from scratch or for those cases where a new functionality is required to be added to an existing web app.

Updated Software Components Promising Better Performance

A few libraries have been upgraded too to their most recent versions:

• jQuery library updated to version 3.6
• jQuery-UI library updated to version 1.13.0
• Other JavaScript libraries upgraded too
• Deprecated in jQuery 3.6.x methods have been removed
• RequireJS library upgraded to the most recent version 2.3.6
• Support for Elasticsearch 7.16 and OpenSearch 1.2
• PHPUnit upgraded to 9.5.x
• Support for TinyMCE 5.8.1

Inventory Check Flexibility to Speed Up Cart Load

A new flexibility feature to enable/disable inventory check on Cart Load is given which speeds up the checkout with multiple goods. When Disabled, Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 will not conduct the inventory check while the checkout, thus making it faster.

Note: Users of Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 on Cloud will have to transition from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch.

In a nutshell: Better development experience

Solid Security Upgrades = More Reliability Than Ever

An inevitable security upgrade that guarantees Magento security to appreciate the trust of millions of eCommerce business owners and customers. The latest security enhancements have made the operations more secure than ever for the platform users and their end-customers.

The complete list is given below:

• Magento database now no longer keeps track of session IDs.
• Default HTTPS (Secure URL) for store front-end and admin.
• Uploads of non-alpha-numeric file extensions have been improved to ensure safer data upload.
• Support for Google reCAPTCHA has been added to coupon codes.
• Only Encrypted Password reset tokens and OAuth access tokens will now be stored in Magento 2.4.4 database.

In a nutshell: Enhanced Security, Stability, Reliability.

Existing Bugs/Issues Fixed with Magento 2.4.4

The latest Magento version 2.4.4 comes with a resolution of a couple of issues related to installation, deployment, and upgrades in the previous versions.

“Invalid security or form key. Please refresh the page.”- This error was being faced a lot of times for the admins during the login process. It is resolved successfully in Magento 2.4.4.

The newest Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 also has the accessibility errors resolved which existed during navigation to the cart and checkout page. This was done to boost experience. The removal of duplication values insertion into MySQL database table has been resolved too.

In a nutshell: Quality performance & functionality for better user experiences.

Vector Bundled Extensions

All the previous versions before the Magento v2.4.4 were loaded with a long list of third-party extensions third-party modules.

With the latest version (v2.4.4) of this top eCommerce platform, Adobe has now decoupled almost all third-party modules from the Magento core set. Only the Braintree extension remains in the list of vendor-bundled extensions for Magento 2.4.4.

You can view or download all the third-party extensions and modules from Magento Marketplace. It is optional.

In a nutshell: Different process to search 3rd-party extensions.

GraphQL Improvements = Enhanced Capabilities

Noticeable improvements come along to GraphQL too with this Magento version upgrade. They are given below:

• The GraphQL library has been updated to the latest version. The webonyx library, which enables core GraphQL to function, has been upgraded to v14.9.
• GraphQL library has been worked upon to improve the cart operations. The collectQuoteTotals() method is only called once during a GraphQL request. This results in less delays and as a result, faster responses.
• Magento 2.4.4 has solved the previous issues related to translation with the help of GraphQL resolver that now returns accurate translated messages depending on the store’s multi-site and multilingual requirements.
• To improve the performance of your store front, GraphQL requests are being cached using Storefront API now in the latest version.
• New Relic now gives descriptive transaction names to GraphQL which could be of a great help in debugging process.

In a nutshell: Extended system capabilities with improved GraphQL

But don’t know where to start?

Not a problem. We can help you. Bytes Technolab is a top software development company having received global recognition having delivered successful eCommerce and Marketplace applications though top Magento development services.

Since 2011, we have been the pioneers to design, develop, customize, and deploy Magento-powered solutions. Our deployed solutions for Fortune 500 companies, enterprises, and startups are used by the millions of end-users.

If you wish to hire Magento developers to speed up your eCommerce or marketplace app development project with free consultation, what are you waiting for?

Drop inquiry to hire eCommerce Gurus now! We’ll be happy to help you with utter confidentiality of your business idea.

Cheers!