Echo JS 0.11.0

> during the browser wartime IE vs Netscape’s Navigator

It's worth Noting that jQuery first came out in 2006, Firefox/bird had then been out for around 3 years, and was preferred over Netscape Navigator at that point.  IE6 had been out for around 5 years itself.

The problem at that time is that many (most?) people were still on dial up connections, and downloading a new browser was still problematic for many.  This meant that many were still on IE6, which had a market share in the high 80%'s, though by 2009 it will be around 70%.  The alternative browsers (mostly Firefox) had been gaining steady ground, Chrome bursted in 2008.  Each had some annoying quirks (mostly IE6, again 5yo at that point).

jQuery bridged a *lot* of gaps in dealing with DOM selection and events by normalizing the interfaces that were often very different with some weird bugs all around.  Beyond this, if you used *only* jQuery to register and unregister your event handling, it dealt with some really bad memory leaks (mostly IE, but others too).

As the article says though, times have changed significantly, today the major/current browsers are much more alike than different.  Most of the missing features aren't used much (yet) and mostly easily polyfilled.  Tooling is also much better, out of Node.js came common-js packages, which brought browserify and followed by webpack, rollup and others combined with 6to5/Babel.  Today, with modern tooling, you can write modern JS, use modern UI frameworks and create incredible web based applications with browsers that perform well, and have very little variance (if you can exclude IE altogether).

In the early-mid 00's, I was a big fan of E4X (EcmaScript for XML) which allowed me to use really nice rendering approaches with Mozilla browsers, flash/flex and VB.Net on the server.  JSON (Ajax/Fetch) and React are much better, but didn't come around until over half a decade later.

On "alternative libraries", what jQuery did was much lower level of an abstraction than any of the frameworks/libraries mentioned and aren't really the same... They can do the same types of work, but aren't really the same at all.

In the end, I'd much rather be a web developer today than 15-20 years ago.  It's so much nicer now, despite a lot of noise from detractors.  Overall, relatively nice article, if not very technical from flatlogic (vs the typical self-promotion sales of templates they try to post about).