jQuery now runs on every second website

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 13 August 2012 in News, JavaScript Libraries, JQuery

John Resig wrote a blog post about "Selectors in Javascript" in 2005, describing an idea on how to manipulate HTML elements by using JavaScript. When he finished that post with "more coming very soon", he might not have envisioned how much more there would actually come.

Only seven years after that initial idea, the jQuery library now runs on every second website. An incredible achievement. In the last year, every 4 minutes one of the top 1 million sites started to use jQuery. It was the fastest growing web technology in 2011, and there is no sign of a saturation yet.

When we compare this with other technologies that enable webmasters to build interactive websites, we see for example Flash at 23.1% usage rate and Silverlight at 0.3%. That shows that "Selectors in Javascript" are probably not a bad idea.

There are, of course, other JavaScript libraries that in many ways compete with jQuery. Other libraries offer different concepts and functionality, but the 88.3% market share of jQuery seems to indicate that jQuery delivers what many webmasters need.

Many sites use more than one JavaScript library. One interesting fact is, that sites that use other popular libraries very often use jQuery as well. 49.5% of MooTools sites use jQuery and 49.2% of Prototype sites do. That is almost the same as the overall jQuery usage rate. The fact that a site uses MooTools or Prototype does not reduce the likelihood that is uses jQuery, as if there were no overlapping functionality.

Sites that change from one JavaScript library to another tend to switch to jQuery, see our technology change survey.

jQuery is used even more amongst the top 10,000 sites, with 58.8% usage rate, a bit less again amongst the top 1,000 sites with "only" 46.2%.

Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Yemen are remarkable in that they are the only countries where jQuery is not the most popular library. jQuery has also a relatively low usage rate in China (33.5%) and Japan (42.9%). The highest usage rates are in Macedonia (71.4%), Ireland (65.1%), Australia (64.7%) and amongst .edu sites (71.5%).

Another interesting finding of our surveys is the fact that jQuery sites are not overly keen on using the jQuery content delivery network. 73.4% of them don't use any CDN, and 94.2% of the rest use the Google Libraries API.

Congratulations to John Resig and the jQuery community. I think it is not too much to say that you have significantly contributed to change the way the web works today.

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All the figures mentioned in that article can be found in our extensive jQuery Market Report and in our JavaScript Libraries Market Report.
Please note, that all trends and figures 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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