JavaScript Libraries Statistics

02 Jun 2011 — San Francisco

A couple of weeks ago we started gathering data about the use of popular JavaScript libraries across our network and yesterday we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a hundred thousands websites. The results are available below.

Methodology

For about two weeks 2% of Disqus instances were sending back information about the popular libraries installed on the page. Here is the code we used to check for libraries and their versions:

var jquery   = window.jQuery && jQuery().jquery;
var jqueryui = window.jQuery && jQuery.ui && jQuery.ui.version;
var protojs  = window.Prototype && Prototype.Version;
var dojo     = window.dojo && dojo.version.toString();
var mootools = window.MooTools && MooTools.version;
var ext      = window.Ext && Ext.version;
var yui      = window.YUI && YUI.version;

Also keep in mind that the majority of websites that install Disqus are blogs, online magazines and other publications. For example, these stats could be very different among web apps.

Results

Libraries:

(Libraries other than jQuery, MooTools and Prototype had less 0.01%)

jQuery versions:

What’s Next

We will probably do more surveys in the future about some non-general purpose libraries like Modernizr, etc. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Kim Weisberg for editing drafts of this.

Anton Kovalyov