# jQuery 111 Hacker News commenters recommended jQuery and 48 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 16 years (8 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Loved for its terse, chainable DOM API, cross-browser consistency and long-term stability, though critics say modern browsers made it redundant and larger apps turn into spaghetti. ## Why people recommend it - Terse, chainable, readable syntax (5 comments): "The terse and chainable jQuery syntax is more readable, easier to remember, and thus more pleasant to maintain." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46666256)) "I love jQuery and it’s elegant methods chaining over object / array of DOM elements you keep in the chain." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667090)) "I prefer the terseness of jQuery's API and things like chaining dom operations with the fluent API" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629056)) - Smooths over browser inconsistencies (6 comments): "Browser inconsistencies in the early days were practically insurmountable without jQuery to provide a consistent API surface." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180125)) "it's like 30k minimised and just bridged a bunch of functionality that browsers lacked at the time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655354)) "JQuery serves very well for that and for keeping me out of browser compatibility issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49577017)) - Simple interactivity for server-rendered sites (6 comments): "jQuery is still my way to go for any website requiring some custom interaction that isn't available in vanilla js." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665555)) "prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476581)) "Server side rendering + htmlf endpoints and JQuery load was always the sweet spot for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47033545)) - Stable with few breaking changes (5 comments): "jQuery, for as long as it's been around has had very few major releases, 4 now.. and very few breaking changes... hardly "biting"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695576)) "It's nice that jQuery still supports those users and the products that they are still running." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664981)) "I cannot express how much I admire the amount of effort jQuery puts into their upgrade tools." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665576)) ## What people warn about - Hard to maintain in larger apps (7 comments): "IMO it is literally not possible for a medium+ jQuery app to fit in a brain or be maintained easily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629545)) "It's fantastic up until that point, and incredibly easy to footgun beyond it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716803)) "It can get unwieldy compared to keeping all your rending logic in one place and applying data to it like in React." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46317801)) - Mostly replaced by native browser APIs (4 comments): "the vast majority of its once handy features are now baked into JS in the browser by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48272358)) "I don't think there's a reason to go out of your way to use it just for the sake of using it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673107)) "Now that IE is dead and most of the cross-platform implementation differences have been fixed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50325147)) - Breaking changes make upgrades annoying (3 comments): "after JQuery 1.x, and in particular, the changing, the deprecating, and the dropping of things here and there, JQuery no longer made sense" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674055)) "Breaking changes means more of an upgrade hassle on something that's already not worth much of an upgrade hassle to begin with." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667339)) "Breaking backwards compatibility to turn 27kb into less because of "bloat" makes less sense to me." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665950)) - Slower and heavier than native (3 comments): "so much of it was a nightmare that just got endless workarounds heaped on top for basic performance issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49951955)) "$() CSS parsing and DOM traversal was way slower than querySelector or getElementById" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655823)) "quickly exceeded my goal of keeping the front-end at under 40KB total gzipped" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672873)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Picknplace.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/picknplace-js.md): 58 recommend - [Alpine.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/alpine-js.md): 50 recommend - [Effect (TypeScript library)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/effect.md): 38 recommend - [Video.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/video-js.md): 24 recommend - [Hotwire Turbo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/turbo.md): 22 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "jQuery", https://hackerapproved.com/p/jquery/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).