Twenty years ago last week, on 26 August 2006, jQuery 1.0 shipped its first stable release. John Resig had first shown the library at BarCampNYC in January of that year, with a motto that now reads like a mission statement for a generation: writing JavaScript should be fun. Marking the moment on X this week, Resig wrote:

Many of those responsible are quite possibly no longer on this platform, but 20yrs ago TODAY the mythical @jquery launched v1.0.

The jQuery Reunion site, promoting the 20th birthday gathering held in Dallas in January, put it well:

Remember the web before the dollar sign? A time of document.getElementById, wrestling with browser inconsistencies (hello, IE6!), and writing verbose JavaScript just to make a simple dropdown menu work.

jQuery collapsed all of that into $(). You could select elements with CSS syntax, chain operations, animate, and fire off an Ajax request in a line or two, and it behaved the same in every browser that mattered.

jQuery democratised front-end work. It made JavaScript approachable for designers and back-end developers who found the raw language intimidating, and as one retrospective put it, "the idea that you could write less, do more influenced every framework that came after." TechCrunch noted as early as 2009 that libraries like jQuery "drastically lower the barrier of entry for developers to build rich web applications."

Going back ten years ago in its ten-year post, the team credited "a strong community of users and contributors who pitched in to help newcomers." That community left a bunch of gratitude in the comments, on the 10th anniversary one commenter simply wrote "jQuery saved JavaScript!" while another called it "the life blood of any developer."

On Hacker News that same week, a reader commented:

jQuery was important not just because of the feature set, but because it completely dominated the industry. jQuery and its ecosystem of plugins created a single community for JS developers. A lot of subsequent work wouldn't have been as successful without that strong community in place to spread ideas.

As browsers standardised and frameworks arrived, jQuery became shorthand for a style of code people wanted to leave behind. The freeCodeCamp forums captured the shift in feeling towards jQuery as frameworks started to take over:

I wouldn’t say most are disparaging jQuery as they are promoting higher-level alternatives to it. jQuery is all about directly manipulating the DOM in a very procedural way: update this data, find this element, give it this class, put these elements in it, find that element, remove these classes, and so on. Modern frameworks like React and Angular are far more declarative, saying this data belongs to this part, here's how it looks, now take care of it whenever it changes.

Along with the frameworks, browsers started to roll out native replacements. querySelectorAll, fetch and classList now cover most of what jQuery was reached for, which is why sites like You Might Not Need jQuery exist and why one developer in a jQuery 4.0 discussion on Hacker News argued "there isn't much reason to use jQuery these days other than keeping with the idioms of a legacy system." There is a security dimension too. HeroDevs notes that old jQuery vulnerabilities still dominate real codebases precisely because the library is so deeply and quietly embedded.

W3Techs still puts jQuery on roughly 66 percent of all websites and the overwhelming majority of those running any known JavaScript library, carried along by WordPress, Drupal, Bootstrap and Cypress. Much of that is legacy, but not all of it is grudging. A steady stream of "why I still use it" pieces, from Docker's engineering blog to Alex MacArthur's Let's Stop Making it Cool to Hate jQuery, argues the library "helped make the web, and you, what they are today."

jQuery is a fast, small and feature-rich JavaScript library, originally created by John Resig and first released in 2006. It simplifies tasks such as HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation and Ajax through an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers. jQuery is free, open-source software distributed under the MIT license, and is now maintained by the OpenJS Foundation and a community of contributors.