14 DAY TRIAL // On jQuery's ten-year birthday, the team is more preoccupied with celebrating the death of Internet Explorer versions 8, 9, and 10 than their own anniversary.
Few people know that jQuery was first presented to the world on January 14, 2006, at a developer conference in New York, long before GitHub existed, where everyone launches their coding projects nowadays.
With little social media push behind it, the framework made a name for itself in time. Six years later, the jQuery Foundation was born, an organization that governed the framework's development and later took other JavaScript projects under its wing, like QUnit, jQuery UI, Dojo, Lodash, and, more recently, Grunt.
But let's get back to the good part, IE 8-10's death. Last summer, the jQuery team announced version 3.0 Alpha of their library, which also included a 3.x Compat version for older IE releases.
jQuery 1.x and 2.x branches will be retired
With the official retirement of these browsers (all problematic IE versions between 6 and 10 are now dead), the jQuery team is now free to drop the 3.x Compat version.
Additionally, the 1.x branch that was kept alive only for supporting older IE version will be discontinued as well, after outlasting its usefulness a long time ago.
The 2.x branch, which included the code responsible for jQuery's "new" direction, will be dropped as well, and to avoid any confusion, from now on, there will be only one jQuery branch, the 3.x release.
If you think that jQuery became irrelevant thanks to libraries like AngularJS and React, you're wrong! You're terribly wrong! In the summer of 2014, we reported that, according to Builtwith.com, jQuery was deployed on ~55% of all the Top Million sites on the Internet. This number grew to ~64% in the summer of 2015 and is now at ~78%. Does jQuery look like a dead library to you?