jsKjs Get jsKjs

What aged in jQuery · 1 of 8

The weight of compatibility

jQuery 4.0.0 weighs 26.8 KB gzipped — and most interactive sites add three more libraries beside it. Much of that weight pays for problems evergreen browsers already solved.

Why it made sense

In 2006 every browser disagreed about events, styles, AJAX and the DOM. A layer that normalised them all was worth almost any size, and jQuery's was small for what it did.

What changed

jQuery 4.0.0 still supports Internet Explorer 11 — the team has said IE11 support goes in jQuery 5 — so code paths for browsers outside most support matrices still ship to every visitor. And jQuery alone no longer covers what sites need: we measured the official minified builds (gzip -9, npm, October 2026):

Official minified builds from npm (jquery, htmx.org, alpinejs, gsap), compressed with gzip -9, October 2026. jsKjs ports the commonly used subset of each — see exactly what's included.

What jsKjs does instead

jsKjs targets evergreen browsers only (Chrome/Edge/Firefox 90+, Safari 15+) and leans on what they already do natively: querySelectorAll, classList, fetch, Proxy, WeakMap, requestAnimationFrame. That lets one ~8 KB file carry a jQuery-compatible core and focused versions of the other three.

Honest caveat: jsKjs ports the commonly-used subset of each library, not all of it. The comparison pages list exactly what is and isn't included.

jQuery

HTML
<script src="jquery.min.js"></script>        <!-- 26.8 KB -->
<script src="htmx.min.js"></script>          <!-- 16.4 KB -->
<script src="alpine.min.js" defer></script>  <!-- 19.4 KB -->
<script src="gsap.min.js"></script>          <!-- 27.6 KB -->

jsKjs

HTML
<script src="https://jskjs.org/cdn/1.0.0/jskjs.min.js"></script>  <!-- ~8 KB -->

Sources