Category: 4. Facts

jQuery has always been free and open source. It is maintained by the jQuery Foundation and supported by a large community of developers around the world. This openness helped it spread quickly, since anyone could use it, contribute to it, or build plugins on top of it.

To make things even easier, the jQuery team released jQuery UI, a companion library that offered ready-to-use widgets and effects. Developers could instantly add sliders, datepickers, tabs, tooltips, and drag-and-drop functionality without writing heavy code.

jQuery’s simplicity influenced the design of modern frameworks. Concepts like chaining methods, selecting elements easily, and simplifying DOM manipulation inspired developers of tools such as React, Angular, and Vue. In a way, jQuery paved the path for the frameworks we use today.

Even though modern frameworks like React and Vue dominate today, jQuery hasn’t disappeared. Because of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and countless older projects, around 70–80% of websites still load jQuery in some form. It’s a reminder of how deeply the library shaped the web.

jQuery wasn’t just a library—it was the center of a huge ecosystem. Thousands of plugins were created for it, covering everything from image sliders and modal popups to form validation and interactive charts. This plugin library allowed developers to add complex features without starting from scratch.

Back in the mid-2000s, every browser had its own quirks. A script that worked in Internet Explorer might break in Firefox or Safari. jQuery became famous for solving this problem. Developers could finally write one set of code that behaved consistently across all major browsers.

Despite its impact, the minified version of jQuery is just about 90 KB. That’s tiny compared to modern frameworks. Yet, this small file simplified tasks that used to require dozens of lines of vanilla JavaScript, saving developers time and effort.

One of the biggest reasons for jQuery’s dominance is its inclusion in WordPress. Since WordPress powers millions of websites worldwide, jQuery automatically became part of them. Even today, a huge percentage of websites load jQuery only because of this integration.

By 2015, jQuery had become a web development standard. Studies showed that more than 70% of the top 1 million websites were powered by jQuery. From small blogs to massive corporate websites, everyone relied on it to handle interactivity and cross-browser issues.

jQuery was first introduced by John Resig at the BarCamp NYC conference in January 2006. His goal was to make JavaScript easier to use and solve the frustrating problem of inconsistent browser behavior. What started as a small side project quickly became the most popular JavaScript library in the world.