At this point, you would be forgiven for thinking that I've completely lost the plot, particularly when we've just been examining ways of optimizing it, only to suggest that we completely remove its use from our code. Why, I hear you ask, would I even consider dropping jQuery?
Well, there are several good reasons for this. Anyone can write jQuery code, but the smart developer should always consider if they should use jQuery to solve a problem:
jQuery is an abstraction library. It needs JavaScript, and was built at a time when developing for browsers of the day could be a real challenge. The need to abstract away browser inconsistencies is becoming less and less. It's important to remember that we should use jQuery to progressively enhance plain JavaScript; jQuery was first and foremost designed to make writing JavaScript easier, and is not a language in its own right.
Browsers are closer than they've ever been, in terms of offering functionality. With Firefox...