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.
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.
I’ve already had some thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post about trust. I wrapped up my thoughts with a request:
I would love it if someone could explain why they avoid native browser features but use third-party code.
I can’t speak for the industry, but I have a guess. Third-party code (like the referenced Bootstrap and React) have a history of smoothing over significant cross-browser issues and providing better-than-browser ergonomic APIs. jQuery was created to smooth over cross-browser JavaScript problems. That’s trust.
Very true! jQuery is the canonical example of a library smoothing over the bumpy landscape of browser compatibilities. But jQuery is also the canonical example of a library we no longer need because the browsers have caught up …and those browsers support standards directly influenced by jQuery. That’s a library success story!
Charles Harries takes on my question in his post Libraries over browser features:
I think this perspective of trust has been hammered into developers over the past maybe like 5 years of JavaScript development based almost exclusively on inequality of browser feature support. Things are looking good in 2022; but as recently as 2019, 4 of the 5 top web developer needs had to do with browser compatibility.
Browser compatibility is one of the underlying promises that libraries—especially the big ones that Jeremy references, like React and Bootstrap—make to developers.
So again, it’s browser incompatibilities that made libraries attractive.
Jim Nielsen responds with the same message in his post Trusting Browsers:
We distrust the browser because we’ve been trained to. Years of fighting browser deficiencies where libraries filled the gaps. Browser enemy; library friend.
For example: jQuery did wonders to normalize working across browsers. Write code once, run it in any browser — confidently.
Three for three. My question has been answered: people gravitated towards libraries because browsers had inconsistent implementations.
I’m deliberately using the past tense there. I think Jim is onto something when he says that we’ve been trained not to trust browsers to have parity when it comes to supporting standards. But that has changed.
Charles again:
This approach isn’t a sustainable practice, and I’m trying to do as little of it as I can. Jeremy is right to be suspicious of third-party code. Cross-browser compatibility has gotten a lot better, and campaigns like Interop 2022 are doing a lot to reduce the burden. It’s getting better, but the exasperated I-just-want-it-to-work mindset is tough to uninstall.
I agree. Inertia is a powerful force. No matter how good cross-browser compatibility gets, it’s going to take a long time for developers to shed their suspicion.
Jim is glass-half-full kind of guy:
I’m optimistic that trust in browser-native features and APIs is being restored.
He also points to a very sensible mindset when it comes to third-party libraries and frameworks:
In this sense, third-party code and abstractions can be wonderful polyfills for the web platform. The idea being that the default posture should be: leverage as much of the web platform as possible, then where there are gaps to creating great user experiences, fill them in with exploratory library or framework features (features which, conceivably, could one day become native in browsers).
Yes! A kind of progressive enhancement approach to using third-party code makes a lot of sense. I’ve always maintained that you should treat libraries and frameworks like cattle, not pets. Don’t get too attached. If the library is solving a genuine need, it will be replaced by stable web standards in browsers (again, see jQuery).
I think that third-party libraries and frameworks work best as polyfills. But the whole point of polyfills is that you only use them when the browsers don’t supply features natively (and you also go back and remove the polyfill later when browsers do support the feature). But that’s not how people are using libraries and frameworks today. Developers are reaching for them by default instead of treating them as a last resort.
I like Jim’s proposed design princple:
Where available, default to browser-native features over third party code, abstractions, or idioms.
(P.S. It’s kind of lovely to see this kind of thoughtful blog-to-blog conversation happening. Right at a time when Twitter is about to go down the tubes, this is a demonstration of an actual public square with more nuanced discussion. Make your own website and join the conversation!)
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.”
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.
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).
I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary.
Brian said it explicitly of his PhoneGap project:
The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.
That makes total sense, especially if your code is a polyfill—those solutions are temporary by design. Autoprefixer is another good example of a piece of code that becomes less and less necessary over time.
But I think it’s equally true of any successful framework or library. If the framework becomes popular enough, it will inevitably end up influencing the standards process, thereby becoming dispensible.
jQuery is the classic example of this. There’s very little reason to use jQuery these days because you can accomplish so much with browser-native JavaScript. But the reason why you can accomplish so much without jQuery is because of jQuery. I don’t think we would have querySelector without jQuery. The library proved the need for the feature. The same is true for a whole load of DOM scripting features.
The same process is almost certain to occur with React—it’s a good bet there will be a standardised equivalent to the virtual DOM at some point.
When Google first unveiled AMP, its intentions weren’t clear to me. I hoped that it existed purely to make itself redundant:
As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask “Why can’t our regular pages be this fast?” By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be.
Alas, as time has passed, that hope shows no signs of being fulfilled. If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting their “regular” pages put on weight.
Worse yet, the messaging from Google around AMP has shifted. Instead of pitching it as a format for creating parallel versions of your web pages, they’re now also extolling the virtues of having your AMP pages be the only version you publish:
In fact, AMP’s evolution has made it a viable solution to build entire websites.
On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that Google are keen to change).
But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance …which is kind of odd, because that’s also what Google’s Polymer project is. The difference being that pages made with Polymer don’t get preferential treatment in Google’s search results. I can’t help but wonder how the Polymer team feels about AMP’s gradual pivot onto their territory.
If the AMP project existed in order to create a web where AMP was no longer needed, I think I could get behind it. But the more it’s positioned as the only viable solution to solving performance, the more uncomfortable I am with it.
Which, by the way, brings me to one of the most pernicious ideas around Google AMP—positioning anyone opposed to it as not caring about web performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because performance on the web is so important that it deserves a long-term solution, co-created by all of us: not some commandents delivered to us from on-high by one organisation, enforced by preferential treatment by that organisation’s monopoly in search.
It’s the classic logical fallacy:
By marketing itself as the only viable solution to the web performance problem, I think the AMP project is doing itself a great disservice. If it positioned itself as an example to be emulated, I would welcome it.
I wish that AMP were being marketed more like a temporary polyfill. And as with any polyfill, I look forward to the day when AMP is no longer necesssary.
I want AMP to become extinct. I genuinely think that the Google AMP team should share that wish.
Another deep dive into web history, this time on JavaScript. The timeline of JS on the web is retroactively broken down into four eras:
Nice to see “vanilla” JavaScript making a resurgence in that last one.
It’s 2017, the JavaScript ecosystem is both thriving and confusing as all hell. No one seems to be quite sure where it’s headed, only that it’s going to continue to grow and change. The web’s not going anywhere, which means JS isn’t going anywhere, and I’m excited to see what future eras bring us.
Thanks to jQuery, you probably don’t need jQuery. Just look at all these methods that started life in jQuery, that are now part of the standardised DOM API:
remove()prepend()before()replaceWith()closest()I love, love, *love, traintimes.org.uk—partly because it’s so useful, but also because it’s so fast. I know public transport is the clichéd use-case when it comes to talking about web performance, but in this case it’s genuine: I use the site on trains and in airports.
Matthew gives a blow-by-blow account of the performance optimisations he’s made for the site, including a service worker. The whole thing is a masterclass in performance and progressive enhancement. I’m so glad he took the time to share this!
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.
In many ways, moving to vanilla JavaScript highlights the ugliness of working with the DOM directly, and the shortcomings of native Element object — shortcomings which Resig solved so incredibly eloquently with the jQuery API.
Having said that, the lessons I’ve learned over the last year have made me a better developer, and the tools built in the process have opened my eyes and given me enough confidence and understanding of vanilla JavaScript that the only scenario where I would personally consider using jQuery again would be a project needing IE8 support.
From the people who brought you youmightnotneedjquery.com comes youmightnotneedjqueryplugins.com.
Don’t get me wrong—jQuery is great (some of the plugins less so) but the decision about whether to use it or not on any particular project should be an informed decision made on a case-by-case basis …not just because that’s the way things have always been done.
These sites help to inform that decision.
This is a fascinating bit of web archeology: John has annotated the code from one of the earliest versions of jQuery.
The tone is a bit too heavy-handed for my taste, but the code examples here are very handy if you’re weaning yourself off jQuery.
Tim’s been running the numbers on how long it takes various browsers on various devices to parse JavaScript—in this case, jQuery. The time varies enormously depending on the device hardware.
This looks like it could be a great book for anyone looking to get starting with JavaScript.
A handy resource if you’re used to using jQuery for everything but you want to try going JavaScript commando.
Don’t get me wrong: jQuery is great, but for a lot of projects, you might not need 90% of the functionality it provides. So try starting with vanilla JS and only pulling in jQuery if and when you need it.
A nice introduction to writing vanilla JavaScript, especially if you’re used to using jQuery.
A terrific piece by Remy—based on a talk he gave—on when he uses jQuery and, more importantly, when he doesn’t. His experiences and conclusions pretty much mirror my own, but of course Remy is far more thoughtful and smart than I.
Really good stuff.