Pingdom checks on JavaScript usage on top sites
Date : 2008 06 13 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianPingdom, the service that has gotten popular telling us when Twitter is down, has just released stats on which Javascript frameworks are the most common.
The websites were collected from the Alexa US Top 100 and the Webware Top 100 Web Apps. The frameworks we looked for were Prototype, JQuery, MooTools, Yahoo! UI Library, Dojo, ExtJS and MochiKit.
They talk about the various sites that use each framework, and even some that use multiple (e.g. Digg using Prototype and jQuery) and they conclude:
Prototype turned out to be the most-used framework in this survey, with JQuery not far behind. It was also interesting to see that several sites are using the Yahoo! UI Library. We had imagined that this number would be lower and that far more websites would be using Prototype and JQuery.
It should be noted that this survey doesn’t necessarily give a 100% complete picture since we only looked at the homepage of the websites. We also didn’t log in to any websites. And of course, we didn’t look for every single Javascript framework out there.
I asked Peter Alguacil how they decide if a site uses a library, and he updated the article:
We made a list of websites consisting of the Alexa US Top 100 and also Webware’s Top 100 Web Apps (minus actual applications such as Firefox and Skype). Using a special tool we then looked at all the websites after specific keywords to identify the frameworks.
For example, for Prototype we looked for the strings “prototype.js” and “/prototype” which should cover most variations of including the framework, unless the word “prototype” has been completely removed.
We also manually checked all sites that were found to contain references to the frameworks we tested for. In the case of the Yahoo! UI we excluded sites that only used its CSS framework and not any Javascript.
A lot of people will do things like, combine prototype.js with their_app.js and create my_app.js as a compressed and/or minified munging of everything. This means that it won’t be counted. It would be cool to also add checks for JavaScript objects (e.g. run a site with Rhino and check for the “Prototype” object.