Question

Context:
I am astounded by the number of front end developers that hack at HTML, Javascript and CSS all day long and that ignore tools like jQuery ( or other equivalent helper frameworks ) and refuse to use them. I am not talking about JavaScript gurus, I am talking about in the trenches every day Joe production developers. I get a lot of arguments that are more like excuses or personal opinions that I don’t think have any technical merit, I want to make sure I am not missing something.

Question:
What are some empirical technical reasons not to use jQuery?

I am not looking for religious or dogmatic arguments or subjective opinions “like some other framework is better”, consider jQuery the straw man for all comparable frameworks in the question.

Answer 1

Update 2015:

In this answer from 2011 I’m talking about libraries like jQuery, YUI
or Prototype. Today in 2015 that reasoning is still applicable to
frameworks like Angular, React or Ember. In those 4 years the
technology progressed tremendously and even though I see considerably
less prejudice against React or Angular than I saw against jQuery or
YUI, the same kind of thinking – though to a lesser extent – is still present
today.

Update 2016:

I highly recommend an article published few days ago:

• Why jQuery? by Michael S. Mikowski, author of the Single Page Web Applications book

That article is basically a very detailed answer to this very
question. Had it been available when I was writing the answer below – I would have definitely quoted it.

Original answer:

I’ll answer about jQuery but those are the same arguments that I’ve heard against using YUI, Prototype, Dojo, Ext and few others. Main arguments that I’ve heard:

1. file size, which in fact is 84.6 KB in case of jQuery 3.2.1 – probably smaller than the logo on an average website and can be served from Google’s CDN which is likely to be already in the cache of most of your visitors. As using jQuery always means smaller file size of your own JavaScript files, it can actually mean smaller download, even if not already in the browser cache.

2. speed – writing pure JavaScript may be faster, but writing portable JavaScript seems to be impossible for most of the people. A website that is faster but doesn’t work on every popular browser is useless in the real world. Besides jQuery uses some pretty heavy optimizations to actually be pretty damn fast and keeps getting even faster with every release, so it’s actually not so easy to write faster code by hand for anything other than trivial examples.(*)

3. "intellectual property" – a company is scared using someone else’s code – while in fact jQuery is open source and free software that is used everywhere from your grandma’s blog to Amazon, from Twitter to Bank of America, from Google to Microsoft – if they can use it then any company can use it.

4. I can’t remember hearing any other argument being used seriously.

(*) Here’s a trivial example: getElementById(‘someid’) vs. jQuery(‘#someid’)

Is using getElementById faster? Yes. And of course everyone always checks the parentNode to catch when Blackberry 4.6 returns nodes that are no longer in the document, right? jQuery does. And everyone handles the case where IE and Opera return items by name instead of ID, right? jQuery does. If you don’t do it then your code is not portable and you introduce subtle bugs that can be very difficult to find. And getElementById is the most trivial example that one could possibly find – don’t even get me started on events and AJAX and the DOM…

Update:

There is actually a fourth result of asking why someone doesn’t want to use jQuery. I forgot to put it on this list because it is not really an answer but rather the lack of any answer. The comment I got yesterday reminded me about it. This is hardly a "technical reason" to be added to the list but may be interesting nonetheless and may actually be the most common reaction.

What I personally suspect to be the main underlying reason to all of those reactions, though, is what I believe to be the biggest obstacle to progress in computer science: "I don’t want to use it because I never did, therefore it must not be that important."

It was once the reaction to optimizing assemblers, compilers, structured programming, higher level languages, garbage collection, object oriented programming, closures or pretty much everything that we now take for granted — and today it’s AJAX libraries. Maybe some day no one will remember that we once used to manually interact with the raw DOM API on the application level like now no one remembers that we once used to write programs using raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.