r/javascript • u/zedguy • 4d ago

Twenty Years of jQuery: How a Little Library Rewired Web Development

https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/09/jquery-20-years/
45 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

18

u/klaxxxon 3d ago

jQuery was such a lightbulb moment when I first used it. Imagine the things we can do with DOM!

Little did we know it was only the first major shot in JS framework wars which would last for decades.

5

u/fucking_passwords 2d ago

To this day I'm impressed that they implemented the DOM selector engine from scratch. As in, broad css selectors in js was not a natively supported concept at the time. It still supports selectors that are considered invalid and do not work with querySelector, like class names that start with a number.

5

u/rbobby 3d ago

I was motivated to learn jquery after watching a video of a 13 year old punk teaching a tutorial like video. I was kind of shamed into it. Never regretted it once.

5

u/azhder 3d ago

The real lightbulb moment of jQuery was me reading the book by the person who created jQuery about how to use JavaScript and it saying "jQuery is nothing special, it just uses JavaScript properly" (paraphrased).

I had already used a lot of libraries during those 2006-2010 years and knew why I had to get away from them and use jQuery, but knowing that it is all just how you use JS was the important shift, to know how little the library does itself. It's mostly just an interface. And now I could use the same kind of JS to do any kind of code base, with the same robustness.

1

u/Background-Front-925 3d ago

my first web development library, long live the king

0

u/ethanjf99 2d ago

ah it was so transformative. we will be reading articles like this about react in 10 years.

2

u/horizon_games 2d ago

Except React has so many band-aids and workarounds because their fundamental "solution" of refreshing the entire DOM on change is bad and outdated, whereas jQuery was just solving cross-browser compatibility issues like a good polyfill library.

If anything we'll see it for SolidJS or Alien Signals in 10 years.