[SwellJoe]

I suspect the benchmark is flawed, and charging jQuery for one-time penalties for every function. i.e., if you make a page that has nothing but a getElementById call, vs. loading jQuery and executing the query on the DOM, it's obviously going to be a lot slower. Even if that's not the case, "fast enough" is fast enough...and jQuery has proven itself to be fast enough for a lot of stuff. And, most developers working in JavaScript and building their own helper libraries and such are extremely likely to make worse libraries than jQuery. So, it's probably smarter to use a library that's getting a lot of vetting by really smart people. Whether it's jQuery or something else, I'm not gonna go back to hand-written JavaScript (I'm in the midst of converting an app to use jQuery from handwritten functions, and the new version is either faster or similarly fast, and maintenance of the frontend is getting vastly simpler with every element that gets converted from the handwritten functions to jQuery+Bootstrap...hell, sometimes, I'm able to just use markup with no JavaScript on the page at all...and that's like magic).