jQuery got popular because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and other browsers weren’t exactly cross compatible. Writing vanilla JS was risky business in that sense.
It also supported AJAX across all major browsers, which meant the website could make API requests without reloading the entire page. It was super revolutionary to press a button and it only changed a part of the page.
Then Angular and React took it a step forward and that’s where we are now.
I am very aware of the progression. But you’re vastly glossing over how much complexity (and feature set) was added after jQuery. If JavaScript sucks, how would you change it? Shitty browsers implementing it poorly in the past (and safari doing so today) doesn’t make it suck.
jQuery got popular because Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and other browsers weren’t exactly cross compatible. Writing vanilla JS was risky business in that sense.
It also supported AJAX across all major browsers, which meant the website could make API requests without reloading the entire page. It was super revolutionary to press a button and it only changed a part of the page.
Then Angular and React took it a step forward and that’s where we are now.
I am very aware of the progression. But you’re vastly glossing over how much complexity (and feature set) was added after jQuery. If JavaScript sucks, how would you change it? Shitty browsers implementing it poorly in the past (and safari doing so today) doesn’t make it suck.