What is jQuery?

jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers. With a combination of versatility and extensibility, jQuery has changed the way that millions of people write JavaScript.

So according to last sentence jQuery is really kinda big thing... What my problem with it, you may ask?

Simply put according to a second sentence, jQuery developers explains how it should be split:

• DOM:
  • Traversal;
  • Manipulation.
• Event handling;
• Animation;
• Ajax.

Even jQuery kindly shows you how to split itself in its own docs

Still, jQuery moved forward web development by simplifying lots of things. Most important is accessing multiple DOM elements. Which is now a bit redundant thanks to Selectors API. By being so useful and popular to us, lazy programmers, it became most widely used library as of now. What is surprising: it is still popular even though DOM manipulation is becoming anti-pattern. I'm not even talking about Native API providing most of the things. You can even find how to replace your jQuery bloat. Do i need to mention awful $() syntax and jQuery having own wrappers for all DOM objects?

So why library, that isn't even used at 50% is so widely used? Simply because of its popularity:

• Compare JavaScript and jQuery tags on Stack Overflow.
• In most cases when relevant, jQuery is usually suggested on Stack Overflow.
• w3schools has a section about jQuery. Like web development cannot be without it?

While cross-browser support is great, jQuery itself is just old and popular library. And moreover it is used mostly because everyone else is using it. I'm not even talking about how pointless is support of too old browsers.