Download websites that use jQuery-pjax

About jQuery-pjax

Technologies age at different speeds, and a few of them stop being a choice and become a date stamp. jQuery-pjax is one of those. The technique it implements, swapping a page's content with a background request while updating the address bar so the back button still behaves, was a sharp answer to a real problem at a time when a full page reload was the only alternative and component frameworks had not yet become the default answer to everything.

Which means the library says less about how a site works than about when it was built. A page loading it is running jQuery, is handling navigation the way front end work was done in an earlier era, and has almost certainly not been rebuilt since. For anyone researching technical debt, hunting for modernisation work, or scoping which sites a jQuery deprecation would actually hurt, the marker is close to ideal, because nobody adds it to a new project.

There is no company behind the library. The code came out of work at a code hosting service in 2011, was released under MIT, and has sat in a public repository ever since with no vendor, no support contract and no release schedule. The absence of an owner matters to a researcher more than it sounds: nothing forces an upgrade, nothing sends an end of life notice, and a site can carry the library indefinitely without anyone ever being told to act.

As of October 2026 we still record jQuery-pjax on 23,217 sites, and the distribution is lopsided in a way worth noticing. 17,534 of them are in United States, with registrations running to .com. Rather than showing where the technique was fashionable, the concentration mostly shows where sites of that vintage were built and where they were quietly left running.

Version reporting is thin and a little misleading. We hold 176 distinct strings, and the one turning up more often than any other is 1.0, which is what happens when a library is copied into a project's asset folder instead of installed from a package manager. Copies drift, get patched locally, and keep whatever version comment they carried on the day they were pasted in. The version column here indicates how the file arrived far better than it indicates what code is running.

Detection depends on the library's own identifying strings inside the bundled file, so a site that concatenated and minified all of its JavaScript into a single bundle can hide it completely, and bundles built that way are common on exactly the sites likely to carry it. The published count is a floor. Checking a single domain answers a yes or no question about one site. The list answers the question that pays, which is which populations of sites are frozen in an earlier generation of front end practice, where those sites are, and what else they are still running.