Why jQuery Was Born —
And Why We "Graduated" From It

Is "jQuery Is Old" Actually True?

jQuery is old. You've heard it. I've said it. But here's a number that gives me pause: as of 2024, W3Techs reports jQuery running on over 77% of websites across the web. It's baked into the core of WordPress. Tens of millions of sites depend on it. That's not the profile of something that's disappeared.

So what do people actually mean when they say jQuery is "outdated"? Not that it stopped working. Not that it's broken. What they mean is that the problems jQuery was built to solve no longer exist the way they once did. And that's a very different thing from failure.

To understand the distinction, you have to go back to 2006 — and sit in the frustration of what web development felt like then.

The Problem jQuery Was Built to Solve

When John Resig unveiled jQuery at BarCamp NYC in 2006, web developers were living in a kind of quiet nightmare. Internet Explorer 6 held the dominant market share, but Firefox, Opera, and Safari were all gaining ground — each with their own interpretation of how JavaScript should work.

Attaching a click event listener? IE used attachEvent; everyone else used addEventListener. Making an Ajax request? You had to try XMLHttpRequest first, then fall back to ActiveXObject for IE. CSS manipulation, DOM traversal, even basic selectors — every task required a branching block of browser-detection logic. A simple "fade this element in" was 30 lines of timer-based JavaScript.

Resig's genius was deciding not to fix the browsers — but to write a library that absorbed their differences. Developers would write one API. The library would figure out which browser was running and handle the rest internally. The tagline said it all.

The Three Problems That Disappeared

jQuery solved three distinct pain points. Each one vanished over time — not because someone built a better jQuery, but because the underlying platform caught up.

① Cross-browser compatibility

This was the original wound. The gap between IE 6–8 and standards-compliant browsers was wide and real. jQuery papered over it so thoroughly that most developers could ignore it entirely. Then, in 2016, Microsoft retired support for Internet Explorer versions older than IE11. The wound closed. The bandage was no longer needed.

② Verbose DOM APIs

Writing vanilla JavaScript in 2006 was exhausting. Getting an element, binding a click handler, making an Ajax request — these took many more lines than they should have. jQuery compressed them radically.

By 2018, document.querySelector(), addEventListener(), fetch(), and classList were stable across all major browsers. The verbosity problem had been solved — by the platform itself.

③ Animation without pain

fadeIn(), slideDown(), animate() — jQuery's animation API felt like magic in an era when CSS animations were still emerging. Moving an element across the screen required hand-rolled timer logic. jQuery abstracted all of it into a few readable lines.

Then CSS transition and @keyframes matured. The Web Animations API arrived. GPU-accelerated CSS became the standard recommendation. Writing animations in jQuery wasn't just unnecessary — it was now the slower, heavier approach.

What React and Vue Actually Did

It's tempting to frame the story as "React killed jQuery." But that's not quite right. React and Vue didn't solve the same problems jQuery solved — they solved a different problem that jQuery was never built for.

jQuery's model is fundamentally imperative: you tell the browser what to do and when. "Add this class." "Remove this element." "Animate this." For simple interactions, that model is fine. But as web applications grew — as the line between "website" and "application" blurred — managing UI state imperatively became unmanageable. Callback chains, shared mutable state, no clear mental model of how the UI should look given certain data.

When I first built something in React, I remember staring at the component model and thinking: the state management I'd been wrestling with in jQuery for months — this solves it. Not because React is smarter, but because it's asking a different question: instead of "what should I do to the DOM?" it asks "what should the DOM look like given this data?" That shift — from imperative to declarative — is what React offered, and it's what jQuery was structurally unable to provide.

And yet: jQuery still runs on the majority of the web. WordPress sites — which represent over 40% of all websites — ship jQuery in their core. Legacy enterprise systems, government sites, established e-commerce platforms built over the past decade — moving them off jQuery is expensive and risky. Knowing that jQuery's prime is behind it doesn't mean you won't have to read and write it tomorrow.

What jQuery Left Behind

Great libraries don't disappear — they dissolve into the standard. jQuery's ideas are embedded in the web platform we use today, often without us realizing it.

The document.querySelector() API — using CSS selectors to find DOM elements — was jQuery's core innovation. The W3C formalized it as a browser standard. Method chaining, which made jQuery code so readable ($(".el").addClass("active").fadeIn()), found its way into the Fetch API, array methods, and Promise chains. The concept of a simple, ergonomic Ajax wrapper became the Fetch API itself.

The next time you type document.querySelector(), you're using an API that exists because jQuery proved the concept first. That lineage matters. It reminds us that the tools we're using today — React's hooks, Vue's reactivity, CSS container queries — are also provisional answers to current problems. They're good answers. But someday, the platform will absorb them too.

The developers who understand why a tool was built, not just how to use it, will be the ones who recognize that shift when it comes — and know what to reach for next.