Clearly you have some kind of issue with jQuery but just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less popular, useful or prevalent. Here's a fun drinking game - open up the top 1000 websites and do a shot for each one that uses jQuery. You will be in hospital by about #20 I think.
I disagree with your notion that the top 5 sites are a good sample for development trends, but you did miss some uses of jQuery.
Google uses jQuery (and hosts it for millions of sites), just not on their very optimized homepage. They built a very large framework of their own to power their apps, but a lot of their informational sites use jQuery. Here are some examples:
You ought to read comments before replying to them. I clearly said that only those four are using jQuery, and that the remaining sixteen do not. I checked all of them by hand before stating this, except for Wikipedia because it is common knowledge that MediaWiki uses jQuery.
Also, your idea below about sniffing for $ is a bit embarrassing. Firefox, Chrome, etc. have come with $ for many years as an ID or query selector, and it has nothing to do with jQuery. Prototype and MooTools also provide $, and probably a dozen or more similar libraries you haven't heard of.
People on comp.lang.javascript (which has its problems, and I've been away for a while) have been noting this for a while. jQuery chews far more cycles than comparable libraries with its function overloading, extra $(this) invocations and such.
but still the majority of them do, by a wide margin. I don't even know why you're debating this, it's completely obvious that jQuery has by far the largest mindshare.
edit: ok now I get it, I had a look at your website. You like Closure so jQuery must suck, right? Also I would be in the hospital after 5 shots....
Well, don't provide a test like "you'll be in the hospital by #20" if you haven't vetted the results of it first.
My personal advocacy for the Closure Tools does not discredit my views on other tools, and I'm hoping this ad hominem nonsense doesn't fly in such a forum. Quite a few people come into the IRC channel and are using the Closure Compiler with jQuery and I don't give them shit. I take no issue with you using, liking, preferring jQuery.
You know why I like Closure? Because it makes the hard things possible. When you're talking about JavaScript running the web, it's websites like Gmail that matter the most. And you'd have a hell of a time getting Gmail to run as smoothy as it does using a library like jQuery, or even ExtJS.
you're right in that I should have checked first, and really if you think about it it's no surprise that YouTube, Yahoo, Google etc are using their own tools. That does not detract from the point that jQuery has massive, ridiculous mind share and completely dominates the web though. Your point about it being impossible to build a gmail style app in jQuery is extremely dubious. There are an awful lot of complicated JS apps built on jQuery.
If you check you are right. Amazon, eBay, and MSN all use jQuery. (at least on their homepage).
You can't simply look for the global `$` or a single file named jquery.
I work on large corporate applications and we use jQuery, but we would fail the `$` and jquery file test. We don't expose the global `$` and jquery gets combined and minified with our own code.
You seriously underestimate the complexity of Gmail. It may well be the most complex JavaScript application in existence with an appreciable user base.
You make a fair argument. Google has several state-of-the-art JS applications. I thought of Gmail in particular because it probably sees much higher demand and so matters of optimization are probably a bit more important to it. This makes the amount of network activity, client-side caching, etc. it manages really impressive.
But no doubts that Google Docs is in the same ballpark.
