In 2006, an independent developer named John Resig was fed up with a problem that annoyed everyone: JavaScript behaved differently in every browser. While Microsoft, Google, and Amazon had armies of engineers, he had a clean idea and a conference ahead of him. What he presented at BarCamp NYC that year changed the web forever. He called it jQuery, and the magic was in the `$()` symbol. That same year, my daughter was born. Two beginnings that marked my life. **Adoption was immediate and overwhelming.** WordPress officially adopted jQuery in 2007, injecting it into millions of sites at once. Shortly after, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon began hosting jQuery on their own CDNs, distributing one independent developer's code at global scale. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when something is genuinely good. Now look at the other side. Microsoft built .NET between 1999 and 2000, officially launching it in 2002. The problem it set out to solve was real and legitimate: a modern, object-oriented platform with garbage collection and multi-language support for C#, VB.NET, and F#. Companies like Accenture, IBM, and major banks migrated immediately, pulling entire infrastructures into the Microsoft ecosystem. Sounds like an uneven fight, right? On one side, a developer working alone. On the other, one of the biggest tech companies on the planet with heavyweight corporate clients. The outcome should have been obvious. It wasn't. **jQuery won.** The data is undeniable. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed jQuery as the most-used technology for over a decade straight before it was overtaken by React. W3Techs, which tracks technologies across millions of real websites, recorded jQuery present on more than 77% of the entire web. In 2019, at its peak, it was running on 80% of the top 1 million sites in the world. npm, LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor confirmed the same pattern in job listings for years on end. No marketing campaign did that. No corporate contract. It was the open source community freely choosing what solved their problems best. Projects of mine still run on jQuery today, with enviable performance and stability. There's something elegant about a tool that has survived every hype cycle. But technology never stops. React, Angular, and Vue came along, and jQuery gradually gave up the spotlight. The fascinating detail? In 2025, W3Techs still shows jQuery on 77.8% of the top 10 million sites. Much of that is legacy usage — code nobody migrated that keeps running silently, decades later. There's something poetic about that. Now it's your turn: **have you ever used jQuery or .NET?** Did they work well for your projects? And today, what framework are you using? Drop it in the comments