What is the status of jQuery?

Through many projects, I still use jQuery to this day. This library came out in 2006, many years before React, Vue, and even Angular.

JQuery used to be the key to the JavaScript world. It makes it easier to develop Web applications. JQuery is especially straightforward when it comes to DOM manipulation and network requests.

But now, what has changed, who still uses it, and how popular is it?

What’s new with jQuery?

Go to the jQuery official blog page and see what’s changed. Not much happened, to be honest. JQuery3 has a lot of changes, but none of them are really noteworthy. There have been no updates such as the Hooks in React or the Composition API in Vue in the past few years.

The small change is support for for-of loops, so it can now be used with jQuery objects. Underneath, you use requestAnimationFrame to perform the animation.

However, there was no more significant change. The reason is simple: jQuery does what it’s supposed to do pretty well.

Does your company still use jQuery?

When it comes to choosing a technology, the big companies in the market play an important role. When a team of competent developers chooses a technology, it carries a lot of weight. Even though jQuery is losing popularity, it still plays a huge role on the web.

According to Wappalyzer, jQuery still accounts for a whopping 34% of all sites that use JavaScript libraries.

Of course, such data should be taken with a grain of salt: just because there are thousands or millions of sites still using the technology doesn’t mean it’s a good decision. JQuery has also become an essential tool for other libraries.

One of the great uses is Bootstrap, a CSS framework that uses jQuery for all DOM operations. Only in Bootstrap5 did jQuery get removed.

In fact, Stack Overflow still uses jQuery. Other companies using jQuery include:

  • Wellsfargo.com
  • Microsoft.com
  • Salesforce.com

Even big companies like Microsoft. That said, I wouldn’t take the company’s technology stack as the only truth. Even their sites have people who make mistakes or don’t have the time to optimize.

Is jQuery obsolete?

There is no outdated technology, only the right technology for your project. However, I have to admit that jQuery has lost a lot of popularity, especially over the last five years:

Many people think it’s because frameworks and libraries like React, Vue, and Angular are becoming more popular. This is not what makes jQuery obsolete, though, and while both make it easy to build Web applications, there are big differences.

While these frameworks are all about reusable components, data binding, state, and single-page applications, jQuery should always be a dialect of pure JavaScript, and should be understood more as a JavaScript tool library.

//js
let el = document.getElementById('contents');

//jQuery 
let el = $('#contents');
Copy the code

You shouldn’t use React, Vue, or Angular for everything. JQuery is still a great help for sites that don’t have iT.

Frameworks didn’t kill jQuery, modern JavaScript did. In particular, the querySelector method many jQuery fans refer to as their reason for switching.

Advances in JavaScript have made it easier to access the DOM. Even web requests that jQuery handles very well have become much easier in JavaScript with the addition of fetch.

Does jQuery affect performance?

Of course, libraries aren’t that good for your site’s performance. Especially if they are large, load times will increase. However, jQuery is only 30KB, which is not that big. For comparison, look at Vue, React.js, and Angular’s compressed and minimized NPM packages.

  • vue: 22 kb
  • react-dom + react: 41 kb
  • angular: 62 kb

Important: This is just the size of the package. The size of the production package for the application is much larger! So, in terms of load times, jQuery does a pretty good job.

But what about rendering performance?

Large frameworks like to compete for the best performance. Benchmarks typically render large tables or thousands of status updates simultaneously. You can already see the difference in experiments like this, but of course native JavaScript beats them when it comes to extreme performance.

But to be honest, benchmarks usually don’t make that much sense. Especially for websites that display only content and not “applications,” the rendering performance of the library is of little importance. The user will not notice that the drop-down list uses a “slow” library.

The last

JQuery was and is better suited to content-based sites than feature-based sites. In more complex network applications, the three front-end frameworks are a better choice. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with still using jQuery. The library is still very useful in many situations, especially if you already know it. Of course, modern JavaScript also has many new features, we also need to understand and use, always keep the attitude of learning new technology.