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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> jQuery is used by 93.4% of all the websites whose JavaScript library we know.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/js-jquery

Maybe jQuery is seen as outdated in the backend world, but I can assure you that in the webdev world jQuery and Javascript are almost entirely synonymous.

Someone might try to say that hammers are outdated in a world where a nailgun exists, but I can assure you the hardware store sells a lot more hammers than they do nailguns. (In this analogy jQuery would be a hammer and vanilla javascript would be pounding in nails with a big dumb rock).

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> I can assure you that in the webdev world jQuery and Javascript are almost entirely synonymous

Frontend engineer here, and I very much disagree with that sentiment. I'd also love to see what percent of the internet uses jQuery purely on the basis of traffic. There are probably a hundred million generated recipe blogspam pages that use jQuery and get 5 hits per month each, versus companies like Booking, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, etc, that get magnitudes higher amount of traffic. I'd also be curious what percentage of frontend roles are looking for someone proficient in jQuery versus other frameworks. Again, I would bet it to actually be a minority with lower salaries and companies that view their engineers as purely a cost center.

Not going to get into what role I think jQuery should play in pages and apps developed today more broadly, as I've seen that discussion hashed out a million times on HN and it never is productive.

jQuery is literally a requirement for Bootstrap. Most of Google's services use it implicitly.

I agree that it's largely superfluous on webapps, but I would bet a crisp $20 bill that somewhere Airbnb is running a CMS-based site somewhere that loads jQuery.

I will rely on my nailgun v. hammer analogy for this again. I understand that the big scalable web experiences are built using nailguns. But for any sort of small web project that requires just a couple of dozen lines of code, jQuery is still very much implied.

Bootstrap no longer requires jQuery, as of v5 from 2021. Even before then, there were popular ports of the Bootstrap JS to various other frontend frameworks such as React.

What Google services use Bootstrap? Why would they, given Google's component library is Material and their JS lib is Angular?

This feels like a sentiment I'd have supported in 2019, wished we're still true in 2022, and is completely outdated in 2025.

I'm a full stack who phases in and out of feontend. I'm now all in on React + MaterialUI. Even though I think they're a bit shit.

I loved jQuery. I loved doing `$(...raw html)`. But everything it did, the browsers do natively now.

You just don't really need it anymore.

You're comparing combustion engines to nuclear power plants. Most vehicles will have combustion engines, even though a lot of energy is generated with nuclear technology.

> I'd also be curious what percentage of frontend roles are looking for someone proficient in jQuery versus other frameworks.

If they are using jQuery they don't need to hire a frontend engineer, because their problems are solved.

> If they are using jQuery they don't need to hire a frontend engineer, because their problems are solved.

If their site requires minimal interactivity and will never scale to a point where more than 2 or 3 people work on it, then yeah absolutely.

2 or 3 people working on a frontend without strict supervision and hierarchy is literally the same clusterfuck as with any other [non-]stack.

Thanks for this. As I said - I am not a front-end professional. I'm just a nerd who plays around with technology.

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