JavaScript Library Detection

How are JS libraries changing over time?

Now that we have two crawls completed, let’s see what changed.

SELECT
  now.lib,
  now.volume,
  now.volume - previous.volume AS change,
  ROUND((now.volume - previous.volume) * 100 / previous.volume, 1) AS percent_change
FROM (
  SELECT
    lib.name AS lib,
    COUNT(0) AS volume
  FROM
    `httparchive.scratchspace.2017_04_15_js_libs`
  GROUP BY
    lib
) AS previous INNER JOIN (
  SELECT
    lib.name AS lib,
    COUNT(0) AS volume
  FROM
    `httparchive.scratchspace.2017_05_01_js_libs`
  GROUP BY
    lib
) AS now
ON previous.lib = now.lib
ORDER BY
  percent_change DESC

Run it on BigQuery and view the results on Google Sheets.

FuseJS had the biggest change relative to its volume. But in absolute terms, it gained just 3 more sites. The next most significant changes are to Angular and Zepto.js, which acquired 51 and 259 more sites respectively.

In absolute terms, Bootstrap gained the most sites with 397 more. On the other end, jQuery and jQuery UI lost the most sites with -1039 and -894 respectively. One could argue that the 7 biggest losers in web share during this period are all libraries that have been obsoleted in some way by recent advances in web standards:

  1. jQuery
  2. jQuery UI
  3. Modernizr
  4. yepnope
  5. FlexSlider
  6. SWFObject
  7. jQuery Tools

These are exciting changes to see and we’ll continue to monitor them as HTTP Archive continues to collect more data.