Highlights of web technology surveys, October 2010: 1 out of 4 websites use jQuery

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 October 2010 in News, JavaScript Libraries, JQuery

jQuery has always been dominating our JavaScript library survey. It is used by more websites than all the other libraries combined, and its market share is still increasing.

Our latest surveys show that jQuery reached a nice milestone by gaining 25% usage penetration for the first time. This is the latest survey summary:

The jQuery change report shows that jQuery is also gaining from all the other libraries, more from Prototype and Script.aculo.us, a bit less from the others.

The list of popular websites using jQuery reads like the Internet's Who's Who: Wikipedia, Msn, Twitter, Amazon, Wordpress, and so on. It is almost easier to make a list of who is not using it.

A closer look at the detailed surveys shows a few more interesting things. The ever increasing popularity of content management systems has also a significant impact on JavaScript libraries, because, quite understandably, people tend to use the library that is best supported by their CMS. This dependency is shown in our CMS breakdown report. Users of WordPress and Drupal primarily use jQuery, whereas Joomla users prefer MooTools, and vBulletin relies on YUI.

The content language breakdown report is often an indication for preferences of tools in various cultural regions. That makes not much difference for jQuery, as the slightly lower usage in German speaking countries is most likely caused by the popularity of Typo3 in this region, and the same holds for the connection between vBulletin and Arabic speaking countries. Taking that CMS dependency out of the statistics, jQuery seems to be globally accepted.

Considering the fast growth of jQuery usage, it is a bit surprising that the overview of jQuery versions shows that the latest version 1.4, which has been released at the beginning of this year, is used only by less than one quarter of jQuery sites. That is even less than version 1.2, released in 2007. Looks like jQuery users are happy with what they have once it's up and running.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the jQuery development for these achievements. The real winner, of course, are the webmasters and users of all the websites that benefit from having such great open source tools.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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