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Don't they realize the other hand is bloating webpages up with their near monopoly on online advertising?

What else would you suggest for a site to continue to pay its writers? Each site selling static ad space to advertisers? Paywalls? Or firing all employees and becoming a butcher, as Slashdot user bingoUV suggested?

Plus their analytics, big CSS fonts, and promotion of more and more javascript frameworks etc.

By "big CSS fonts", do you mean large point size or large byte size?

If the latter: Say a site uses a lightweight JS library built on the advances in vanilla JS since IE <= 11 sunset, self-hosts it, self-hosts Matomo (formerly called Piwik) for analytics, and offers a meaningful functionality subset when JS is off. How is the site supposed to make its fonts smaller to download?

Provided you're coding only for web browsers that support Vanilla. Edge and Safari, for instance, have tended to lag behind Firefox and Chrome in their Vanilla support, needing a "polyfill" framework to replicate some of the missing parts. And unless you target Edge and Safari, you won't reach Windows 10 S and iOS.

The one silver lining is that IE prior to 11 no longer receives security updates, giving a convenient excuse not to support browsers that are that downlevel. This means the more convoluted Vanilla equivalents of jQuery calls aren't as necessary anymore.

That or site operators should ask themselves if a site really needs jQuery at all as opposed to a lighter-weight framework that runs on top of vanilla. In fact, if a site presents mostly static documents, it can present a view that doesn't require script at all. This is a lot easier now that IE 9 and earlier have reached their end of official support, and IE 11 requires far fewer heavyweight polyfills.

"But I have users who still use unsupported versions of Internet Explorer!" Count them again. If you still have them over the past 30 days, let them know through an occasional message in a lightbox that Microsoft has stopped fixing defects in their operating system, and latent forever-day vulnerabilities will put their computers at risk for intrusion.

And the icing on the cake: Once you stop using googleapis.com, Google can't data mine which sites are referring users to googleapis.com anymore.

I encourage you to check out the source to either JQuery or Sizzle. You'd be surprised how many workarounds are needed even for items like querySelectorAll and xhr2.

I encourage you to check out You Might Not Need jQuery. You'd be surprised how many workarounds aren't needed. This is especially true if you set the slider to exclude IE versions that have known unpatched security vulnerabilities (that is, everything before IE 9).

I agree with you that there are clean ways to do things in plain ECMAScript 5 and HTML DOM. So long as you don't absolutely need to support obsolete* versions of Windows Internet Explorer, you might not even need jQuery.

* IE 8 and especially 7 cause the most problems, but all currently supported Windows operating systems (10, 8, 7, and Vista) can upgrade to at least IE 9.

Chromium (which IS open source) apparently has build issues and isn't even in the normal Fedora repos.

Fedora's fault. In Xubuntu, a Debian derivative, all I have to do is sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.

There was a time not very long ago when Chromium was not available in ubuntu official repositories either, and you had to install it yourself or use a PPA... just like Ubuntu you can get chromium running on Fedora. The reason it's not in their official repositories is more an ideological one, supposedly the packaging of customised dependencies rather than integrating more naturally with the ecosystem goes against the ideals of whomever has authority over what does and does not go in the official list.

I like the chromium project and use it as my main browser, i like the developer community also who are super fast at fixing bugs, but i also understand that it's a very large and far from an ideally designed collection of code, modern browsers are hard and i guess the more pragmatic work-in-progress approach is a better fit for Ubuntu.

And the memory footprint of all browsers is crazy now.

Is this the fault of the browser or of the sites you visit? Back when sites weren't as image- and script-heavy, like Better MF Website, a graphical browser could actually fit on a 16 MB machine. Nowadays sites are covered with carousels full of high-DPI photos, plus developers think they still need jQuery and all its bloat just to get the site out the door faster.

Sure, but modern browsers are definitely memory hungry... i'm a chronic single tasker, i currently have one chrome tab open, the browser was started fresh and navigated to slashdot, summing up the memory footprint of chromium tasks it's taking up around half a GB to view this page, seems a little heavy, and i don't think i can blame all that on this one slashdot page.

Chromium (which IS open source) apparently has build issues and isn't even in the normal Fedora repos.

Fedora's fault. In Xubuntu, a Debian derivative, all I have to do is sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.

And the memory footprint of all browsers is crazy now.

Is this the fault of the browser or of the sites you visit? Back when sites weren't as image- and script-heavy, like Better MF Website, a graphical browser could actually fit on a 16 MB machine. Nowadays sites are covered with carousels full of high-DPI photos, plus developers think they still need jQuery and all its bloat just to get the site out the door faster.

I also don't appreciate them throwing unnecessary crap into the browser like the web developer stuff

Browser developers distribute the debugger with all copies of the browser to keep sites from intentionally detecting a debugger's presence and stopping working if one is found. If everyone has a debugger, the site operator can't block people who want to tinker, learn, and make a site more usable without blocking everyone.

Which is why there is only one framework for desktop apps.

Yeah, you don't need a framework to do basic things

The same is true of the web so long as you aren't trying to support ancient IE.

http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ - jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application.

If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency. Maybe you can include a few lines of utility code, and forgo the requirement. If you're only targeting more modern browsers, you might not need anything more than what the browser ships with.

At the very least, make sure you know what jQuery is doing for you, and what it's not. Some developers believe that jQuery is protecting us from a great demon of browser incompatibility when, in truth, post-IE8, browsers are pretty easy to deal with on their own.

If you need to support IE 7, definitely. But if you don't, you what? Use it anyway. The best of jQuery has been brought into the JavaScript language itself and other libraries. But jQuery still makes a lot of little things easier.

You could use the new querySelectorAll functionality in JavaScript, but learning that teaches you the basics of how to use jQuery. Also, I think jQuery still has a few selectors that aren't in querySelectorAll . Furthermore, querySelectorAll is very long to type.

You can use a different AJAX library, but is that library any easier or better than jQuery? You can do AJAX with no library, but bare JavaScript API is ugly.

It might be better to use Q for promises, but the API for Q is about the same as the jQuery promises API.

Again, you might get these things from other libraries but it has deep extend. It is much nicer to trigger events with jQuery. Ready is much nicer with jQuery.

Ironically, I'm going to refer you to http://youmightnotneedjquery.c... Because guess what? When you look, a lot of those things are a lot easier with jQuery and that site makes it clear.

Also, there are jQuery plugins. I don't think writing jQuery plugins is something that you want to do for a modern webapp, but you might find yourself supporting them.

Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards.

I'm curious how long Microsoft will continue improving Internet Explorer for Windows 7. Microsoft has historically ended development of new IE features once a particular version of Windows goes into extended support. This means Windows Vista is stuck on IE 9, and unless IE 12 comes out before January 2015, Windows 7 will be stuck on IE 11. In any case, even IE 9 supports enough of the W3C DOM that you might not need jQuery or any other monolithic framework in your site's JavaScript. People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

I would have modded you flamebait since you are using a reference that contradicts your statement in the first line on the site.- "jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application."http://youmightnotneedjquery.c... #incaseyoumissedit

JQuery is a hack. A useful one, but still a hack. You should be accountable for all your production code, and there's really nothing jQuery does that you can't do yourself with only a little more effort. http://youmightnotneedjquery.c... #incaseyoumissedit

http://youmightnotneedjquery.c... ;)