Why jQuery’s Dominance Is Fading: From Web 2.0 Star to Legacy Tool

Once a near‑global front‑end tool, jQuery dominated the early Web 2.0 era, but as browsers standardized and native APIs improved, many sites now view it as technical debt.

For example, the UK government site GOV.UK removed all jQuery dependencies, cutting JavaScript size by 32 KB (31‑49%) and improving performance. Bootstrap 4.3.1 announced plans to drop jQuery for version 5, and GitHub’s 2018 redesign eliminated jQuery in favor of vanilla JavaScript.

Nevertheless, BuiltWith reports over 69 million live sites still use jQuery, with 75.6% of the top‑million‑traffic sites relying on it.

Web 2.0, jQuery’s Bright Debut

The story begins with the 1990s browser wars. Netscape’s Navigator captured three‑quarters of the market, and its founder Marc Andreessen envisioned a “glue” scripting language—JavaScript—to simplify web page creation.

In 1995 JavaScript appeared, but cross‑browser inconsistencies made development painful. John Resig created jQuery in 2006 to provide a concise CSS‑selector engine (later Sizzle) and hide browser quirks, embodying the motto “write Less, Do More.”

jQuery simplified DOM manipulation and event handling, quickly gaining support from Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Nokia, and others. The jQuery Foundation was founded in 2011 to sustain the library.

jQuery’s Position in the Jianghu Fades?

Although still widely used, jQuery is increasingly seen as redundant. The rise of HTML5 standardized DOM APIs, and modern MVVM frameworks (Angular, React, Vue) offer higher‑level abstractions that eliminate manual DOM work.

HTML5’s unified parsing and DOM creation reduced the need for a compatibility layer. MVVM separates data (Model) from UI (View) via a ViewModel, automating DOM updates and rendering jQuery’s core advantage obsolete.

New front‑end frameworks—Angular (2009), React (2013), Vue (2014)—provide component‑based architectures, two‑way data binding, and richer tooling, making them preferred for complex applications.

“I let jQuery buy a bottle of soy sauce, giving it 100 yuan and a detailed route; with Vue I just give the money and the destination.” – analogy illustrating the shift from imperative to declarative development.

Despite this, jQuery remains lightweight, requires no build tooling, and retains a vast ecosystem of plugins, making it a useful “quick‑start” skill, especially for back‑end developers transitioning to front‑end work.

Overall, the discussion is less about jQuery’s status and more about its practical value: how many problems it still solves for developers today.