Goodbye jQuery, My Old Friend

This article, originally published by senior developer Li Songfeng on his personal blog and later reposted with permission, reflects on the evolution and eventual phase‑out of jQuery, a seminal JavaScript library.

The author issues a disclaimer that the piece was written quickly, may omit many excellent libraries, and represents his personal, not industry‑wide, perspective.

In July 2018, GitHub announced the removal of jQuery from its front‑end, opting to rely solely on native APIs, which prompted the author to revisit jQuery’s legacy.

Li recounts his own early involvement: translating jQuery 1.1 documentation in 2007, contributing to later translations, and authoring a Chinese version of "Learning jQuery".

jQuery was created in August 2006 by John Resig to address cross‑browser incompatibilities, alongside contemporaries such as Dojo, MooTools, Prototype, YUI, and Script.aculo.us.

These libraries shared common features: syntactic sugar (chainable calls), powerful selectors, DOM manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax abstraction.

jQuery’s concise description—"a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development"—captured developers’ attention, leading to widespread adoption due to its cross‑browser support, simplicity, stability, and rich plugin ecosystem.

Over the past decade, front‑end development accelerated with HTML5, CSS3, modern ECMAScript (ES6+), and tooling like Node.js and Babel, giving rise to frameworks such as Backbone, AngularJS, React, and Vue.

A 2012 quote from "DOM Scripting, 2nd" stresses that developers should understand JavaScript and the DOM before relying on libraries, warning against using a library as a crutch.

Ray Nicholus’s "You Don't Need jQuery!" series and his book "Beyond jQuery" propose a learning order: first JavaScript, then Web APIs, and finally any library or framework.

The author concludes that while jQuery was instrumental in shaping the modern web, its era is ending; developers should appreciate its contributions but also move toward understanding the fundamentals behind newer component‑based frameworks.