Thank you, jQuery

I turned Huffduffer into a progressive web app recently. It was already running on HTTPS so I didn’t have much to do. One manifest file and one basic Service Worker did the trick.

I also did a bit of spring cleaning, refactoring some CSS. The site dates to 2008 so there’s plenty in there that I would do very differently today. Still, considering the age of the code, I wasn’t cursing my past self too much.

After that, I decided to refactor the JavaScript too. There, I had a clear goal: could I remove the dependency on jQuery?

It turned out to be pretty straightforward. I was able to bring my total JavaScript file size down to 3K (gzipped). Pretty much everything I was doing in jQuery could be just as easily accomplished with DOM methods like addEventListener and querySelectorAll, and objects like XMLHttpRequest and classList.

Of course, the reason why half of those handy helpers exist is because of jQuery. Certainly in the case of querySelector and querySelectorAll, jQuery blazed a trail for browsers and standards bodies to pave. In some cases, like animation, the jQuery-led solutions ended up in CSS instead of JavaScript, but the story was the same: developers used the heck of jQuery and browser makers paid attention to that. This is something that Jack spoke about at Render Conf a little while back.

Brian once said of PhoneGap that its ultimate purpose is to cease to exist. I think of jQuery in a similar way.

jQuery turned ten years old this year, and jQuery version 3.0 was just released. Congratulations, jQuery! You have served the web well.

The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance - Inside GOV.UK

Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.

It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.

How and why we removed jQuery from GOV.UK - Inside GOV.UK

This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!

Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.

The Cost of Javascript Frameworks - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com

Excellent in-depth research by Tim on how the major frameworks affect performance. There are some surprising (and some unsurprising) findings in here.

I wish with all my heart that this data would have some effect but I fear there’s an entire culture of “modern” web development that stick its fingers in its ears and say “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”

Yet Another JavaScript Framework | CSS-Tricks

This is such a well-written piece! Jay Hoffman—author of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter—talks us through the JavaScript library battles of the late 2000’s …and the consequences that arose just last year.

The closing line is perfect.

Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend | GitHub Engineering

You really don’t need jQuery any more …and that’s thanks to jQuery.

Here, the Github team talk through their process of swapping out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript, as well as their forays into web components (or at least the custom elements bit).