Over the years, hundreds of developers have spent countless hours creating patches for jQuery, to either fix a bug of some description or provide new functionality within the library.
The usual route is to submit a pull request against the Core jQuery library for peer consideration. As long as the patch works as expected and does not cause issues elsewhere in the library, then it will be submitted to core.
The downside of this approach means that we're constrained by the release schedule for jQuery; while the developers do an outstanding job, it nevertheless can take time before a patch is committed to core.
What to do? Do we wait in the hope that our patch will be committed?
For some, this won't be an issue—for others, patience may not be their strongest virtue and waiting is the last thing they will want to do! Fortunately, we can get around this by using a method called monkey patching.
Now—before you ask—let me tell you that I'm not...