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Hello everyone and a Happy New Year! To celebrate the new year we’ve rebuilt BuiltWith TrendsPro to provide a faster, more relevant and better value system for 2012 and beyond.

The new TrendsPro subscription offering is a monthly fixed price option that lets you do research on your terms and not of your marketing/sales budget. You can create up to 120 different technology reports per year, get weekly updates on them, filter them as necessary and even integrate them with your Salesforce CRM.

We’ve got backups of data that go back to January 2011, so we can provide a historical report for any of the top sites back to this time. You can use this information to find leads that you might have missed out on or fill gaps in your technology research.

You can filter your result set by almost any combination of information you can think of. For example, do you want leads for customers using a particular hosting provider? Or websites that are only located in United States? Or maybe you only want to target websites which end in .com.

Checkout the new TrendsPro and sign up for a free account.

BuiltWith.com downloaded the top million sites to determine the version usage of jQuery and jQuery plugins. The report details the most popular jQuery versions and plugins in use on the web today.

Introduction

jQuery is the most popular javascript library in use on the web today. Its growth has increased on a monthly basis since 2008 based on our  tracking. Today, jQuery is in use on more than 50% of the top 10,000 sites on the Internet and on 30% of the top million¹.

jQuery History

John Resig launched jQuery on approximately the 16th January 2006 – John wrote on his blog – “Making it to both del.icio.us popular and the front page of digg just shows how badly Javascript programmers want a better library for writing code with.”²

Just over a week later Michael Geary had written the first third-party jQuery plugin, a JSON manipulation function which would later be added to the main jQuery library.

Version 1.0 of jQuery was released on August 26th 2006 and since then there have been 33 increment releases, with the current version at 1.6.4, released on September 12th, 2011.

Trends

BuiltWith.com has been compiling weekly trends of website technology usage since 2008. The following chart shows jQuery usage in the top 10k sites on the Internet -

jQuery Usage in the Top 10k Sites since December 2008

jQuery Version Usage

In the top million sites as provided by Quantcast, 311,654 sites report using jQuery, 60% of those use 5 different versions of the jQuery library.

Top 5 Versions of jQuery in use in the Top Million Sites

Version 1.4.2 is the most popular version of jQuery in use, shortly followed by version 1.3.2. The release cycle of jQuery is typically quite short, ranging from a few days (bad build fixes) to a few months. Version 1.3.2 was the stable version of jQuery until 1.4 was released  11 months later. Version 1.4.2 was also the latest released version for 8 months. The amount of time these were the latest versions of jQuery may be a contributing factor in their increased usage.

291 sites out of the top million reported using version 1.6.4 which was available 7 days after the report was generated.

jQuery Version Changes over 2011 (large version)

The area chart above shows the changes in version usage since January 2011 to October 2011 in the top million sites. It shows how version 1.3.2 and 1.4.2 are being replaced by more fragmented versions of jQuery versions 1.4.3 and above.

Popular jQuery Plugins

jQuery plugins provide additional functionality off the back of the jQuery library. Plugins build on jQuery functionality to provide many different functionality aspects, such as widgets, validation, fixes for older browsers and many more functions.

Popularity of the Top 10 jQuery Plugins in the top million sites³

jQuery UI is the most popular plugin for jQuery. Developed by the jQuery team, it extends jQuery by providing tabs, sliders, calendars many other widgets and a themeing framework.

Mike Alsup’s Cycle plugin, the slideshow plugin, is the second most popular jQuery plugin followed by the Form plugin developed by the same author.

Conclusion

BuiltWith found over twenty thousand different jQuery related files used in the top million sites showing jQuery has a very active third party developer following.

jQuery is helping to shape the next generation of websites. As web sites move into HTML5, CSS3 development and uptake of modern web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox and IE9 continues, jQuery is an indispensable tool and is the de facto tool for website development.

Methodology

The research for this report was carried out by looking for jQuery related javascript files embedded into the homepage of the top million sites. jQuery related files were any which contained the word jquery. From those, if a version number could not be detected in the filename (such as jquery.js) the file was then downloaded to find the version number in the javascript file itself. The historical JQuery usage chart is based on version numbers in JQuery file names only.

The coverage does not include sites which embed jQuery in files which are not named jQuery and also only reported entries where the version number could be identified.

The plugin detection was found in a similar way, this report does not cover any jQuery extensions that do not use the word jQuery in the filename.

References

1. jQuery Usage Statistics
http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/jQuery

2. John Resig – Announcing the jQuery Blog
http://blog.jquery.com/2006/01/24/jquery-blog/

3. Quantcast Top Sites
http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

4. JavaScript Usage Statistics
http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript

On BuiltWith Trends we’ve used Quantcast for generating our trends charts across the top million sites which they consider are the most traffic’d sites on the internet. It is a useful resource and Quantcast provide those top million sites for free, without which sites like BuiltWith Trends would not be able to work.

There are other traffic reporting companies that make their top million sites available, such as Alexa and Google go as far as making the top 1000 available based on their AdPlanner data.

Some people prefer Alexa’s top sites, others prefer Quantcast. We merged the Quantcast Top Million and the Alexa Top Million hoping to find most of the sites the same, the results were unexpected as the overlap was only around 400,000 sites. So from today, website lists will be offered in two varieties “Top Sites” and “Rest of Web”. Top Sites is an amalgamation of Alexa/Quantcast and some other sources of websites that make up the Internet’s top sites. This makes up a list of about 1.8 million unique websites we now track every week (we also track another 128 million less often).

The trends charts on BuiltWith Trends will still use the original Quantcast data as the million URLs in this list is a large enough dataset to provide an accurate trend of web technology usage on the Internet today.

We’ve just added a new website category feature to BuiltWith Trends. Now, providing we have enough data, when viewing a technology on Trends you will see a chart showing the top 10 categories of websites that the technology is found on.

This information lets you find out the general target market of a technology, so for example you can find out what the biggest category for users of Twitter API is at the moment (it’s entertainment). Or, who is the biggest segment of Optimizely Analytics (it’s shopping and business) and who is the biggest customer base of Amazon CloudFront CDN technology (it’s shops again).

BuiltWith Trends Pro users will soon have this category information added to their reports (for free) and also be able to purchase reports based on Technology+Category. At the moment these reports can be requested by sending us an email at support@builtwith.com.

We’ve just released a report into mobile web technology usage on the web. It’s interesting to see the lack of mobile specific web sites that are currently available in comparison to the amount of apps there are in App Stores. We expect this to change in the near future though, take a look at the report below to get an idea of the coverage and technology usage within the top million sites.

You can download this report as a PDF or as standalone HTML.

Introduction

The growth of the mobile web is staggering, with approximately 726 million people having access to a 3G mobile subscription1. With a forecasted increase in growth it seems logical that website owners would begin to offer a mobile alternative of their websites due to the different in experience between using the web with a desktop computer and a mobile device.

Mobile and Web History

At the start of the 21^st century screen resolutions were increasing as graphics cards became more sophisticated and cheaper, LCD monitors provided higher resolution and lower prices for consumers. In January 2000, 56% of visitors to w3schools.com were using 800×600 as their default browser resolution, by January 2011 hardly any of them were². This trend meant that web designers started using 1024×768 as the de facto minimum website resolution over 5 years ago³.

The recent growth of mobile has seen the production of devices such as the Apple iPhone, Google’s Android Stack, Microsoft Windows Phone and BlackBerry all supporting resolutions below the 1024×768 desktop standard, as well as new methods of interaction with a website, such as dragging and clicking with your finger, over the desktop standard of using a mouse.

The mobile internet is a paradigm shift from how the web has been built over the past few years and website designers, developers and owners are beginning to see the benefits it can bring.

Trends

BuiltWith.com has been compiling weekly trends of website technology usage since 2008. The user agent for these requests appears to the website as a normal desktop browser and not as a mobile device. The trends below show how even without requesting content as a mobile device trends in mobile technology have been increasing.

Meta Viewport

The viewport meta tag was originally designed by Apple to resize the layout viewport of a website, a requirement for the mobile device to understand how the website designer has defined how the content should be displayed to the end user. Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iPhone all support the viewport meta tag⁴.

The graph below shows the growth of the viewport meta tag usage within the top 10,000 sites between November 2008 and July 2011 whilst serving content supplied with a desktop usage agent –

Unearthing the Mobile Web

BuiltWith.com visited the websites of the top million sites using a mobile device user agent signature to determine which websites are displaying mobile specific content to these users by comparing the technologies found against the same website visits with a computer desktop user agent.

Top 100 Sites

Of the top 100 sites most visited on the internet⁵, 71 of them have content specifically designed for mobile devices. The remaining 29 either do not support mobile devices or, depending on the device, prompt the user about a device specific application.

Top Million Sites

Approximately 39,000 sites (3.9%) within the top million most visited sites on the Internet report the content as non-scaleable, a strong indicator that the content is designed specifically for a mobile device. 6% of the sites report a viewport meta tag, which suggests the sites are at a minimum, aware of mobile users.

Mobile Technology Usage

On the latest mobile devices desktop technologies can be reused due to mobile browsers having fully capabale JavaScript and CSS rendering engines, however, some JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been developed that provide explict functionality for mobile devices.

jQTouch is currently the most used Mobile JavaScript library in the top million sites, shortly followed by JQuery Mobile, both of which are extensions of JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library used on the web.

Conclusion

The current evolution of mobile devices provide us with low/medium resolution devices with simple easy to use finger based gestures. The human body is the weakest link in the evolution of mobile, the hardware resolution may improve but a website designed for 1024×768 pixels will still look small to our eyes on devices designed to fit in the palm of our hands.

With mobile device usage increasing the the prevalence of data technologies such as 3G it is predicted more websites will support mobile devices in the years to come as websites owners see a shift in their visitor traffic to mobile.

References

1. Google Think Mobile 2011 Kleiner Perkins -http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//events/thinkmobile2011/pdfs/10-mobile-trends.pdf
2. W3schools Browser Display Statistics
   http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_resolution_higher.asp
3. Jakob Nielsen Screen Resolution and Page Layout
   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html
4. Quirksmode – a tale of two viewports part two
   http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/viewports2.html
5. Quantcast Top Sites
   http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

Hi I just wanted to tell everyone about a new feature of Trends Pro called Trends Pro Alerts. It tells you when a website has started or stopped using a particular web technology and is available at BuiltWith Trends Pro.

Trends Pro Alerts provides a clear and reliable way for you to keep up to date with who has added and removed a web technology from their site.

How it works

We check every website in the Quantcast Top Million for changes in technology usage. If we detect they have added or removed a technology that is being tracked, we will added it to your alert report which you can easily export. We also do an additional double check to make sure the site has actually added or removed the technology.

Every week we send a reminder when the process has finished running with an overview of which of the technologies you are tracking have added and removed sites/customers.

Screenshots -

Here’s an example of the report that shows what sites have been added to a technology -

and here’s the example weekly email you get telling you what has changed -

How to get started

Head on over to BuiltWith Trends Pro and setup an account, alerts is available in the top tabs.