jQuery is a JavaScript library, first released in 2006 by John Resig, designed to make it easy to navigate a document, select elements, handle events, and add animation across the many incompatible browsers of the era. Its slogan, “write less, do more,” captured the appeal: a single concise syntax that worked the same everywhere.
The 1.0 release was announced on the official jQuery blog on August 26, 2006. In that post Resig wrote, “I’d like to take this opportunity to announce the brand new jQuery 1.0! A lot of work has gone into this release,” and noted that 1.0 arrived nearly a year after he first floated the idea in a blog post about selecting elements in JavaScript.
The problem jQuery solved was real and painful. In the mid-2000s the same code to find an element or make a network request behaved differently in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. jQuery wrapped those differences in one consistent interface, so developers could stop writing browser-specific branches. It became the workhorse for the AJAX-driven, interactive pages that defined the period.
For roughly a decade jQuery was so common that it was loaded on a large majority of the most-visited websites. As browsers converged on standards and as component frameworks like React changed how interfaces were built, jQuery’s role shrank, but its influence on everyday web development was enormous.