Comment by neya

Is this a joke? A huge percentage of the web is running with Jquery. Jquery targets a different set of audience - Ones that want to do more stuff with less code. This type of audience doesn't care about performance (mostly) because it helps them get things done.

Think of it this way - Everyone loves Ruby on Rails. But Rails IS slow. But that doesn't mean I should re-write my code in just plain C, just because it is fast and Rails is no longer needed according to a bunch of bloggers.

I think this argument is not about Jquery and is about frameworks in general.

In my humble opinion, I think [1]

    $.ajax({
      url: "test.html",
      context: document.body
    }).done(function() {
      $(this).addClass("done");
    });

is better than:

    function ajaxFunction() {
        var ajaxRequest; // The variable that makes Ajax possible!

        try {
            // Opera 8.0+, Firefox, Safari
            ajaxRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
        } catch (e) {
            // Internet Explorer Browsers
            try {
                ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
            } catch (e) {
                try {
                    ajaxRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
                } catch (e) {
                    // Something went wrong
                    alert("Your browser broke!");
                    return false;
                }
            }
        }
        // Create a function that will receive data sent from the server
        ajaxRequest.onreadystatechange = function () {
            if (ajaxRequest.readyState == 4) {
                var ajaxDisplay = document.getElementById('ajaxDiv');
                ajaxDisplay.innerHTML = ajaxRequest.responseText;
            }
        }
        var age = document.getElementById('age').value;
        var wpm = document.getElementById('wpm').value;
        var sex = document.getElementById('sex').value;
        var queryString = "?age=" + age + "&wpm=" + wpm + "&sex=" + sex;
        ajaxRequest.open("GET", "ajax-example.php" + queryString, true);
        ajaxRequest.send(null);
    }

[1]http://www.tizag.com/ajaxTutorial/ajax-javascript.php