Download websites that use Prototype

About Prototype

Some rows in a technology dataset describe what people are building. Prototype describes what people have stopped touching.

Prototype is a JavaScript library first released in 2005 under the MIT licence, from the period when browsers disagreed with each other enough that a compatibility layer was not optional. New projects have not selected it for a very long time. Presence today therefore means something more interesting than adoption.

As of September 2026 the library still answers on 588,438 sites. Germany accounts for 277,652 of those and .de runs through the group, a skew that says more about which shop and publishing platforms bundled Prototype in that market than about the library itself. We record 52 distinct version strings, with 1.7.3 widely present.

A version spread that wide across a library that stopped moving is the whole story. Sites are frozen at whatever their commerce platform, theme, or framework generation shipped with, so the version string works as a fossil layer marking when a site was last rebuilt rather than when it was last edited. Content can be entirely current while the code underneath it has not been touched since the build.

The distribution of those version strings is worth reading alongside the geography. Legacy libraries do not survive at random, they survive where a widely deployed platform embedded them and where that platform's users had no reason to migrate, which is why a national skew in a library this old usually points at a regional commerce or publishing ecosystem rather than at any national preference in engineering taste.

A frozen frontend is a commercial signal and a security signal at once. Modernisation agencies read a list like this as prospects who are demonstrably overdue, with the technical argument already written for them. Security researchers read it as exposure surface, because unmaintained libraries accumulate known issues and the sites carrying them rarely have anyone watching. Platform vendors read it as a migration pool, since a site sitting on an old bundled stack is usually one release cycle away from being abandoned by its own supplier. Anyone doing technical diligence on an acquisition reads it as a question to ask the seller.

None of those readings survives at the level of a single domain. Checking one site tells you that one site is old. The list tells you how large the frozen population is, where it sits, which platforms carry it, which versions cluster together, and whether the group is shrinking at a pace worth planning around, and only a full snapshot measured against an earlier one answers the last of those.

The count leans conservative by construction. Detection depends on the library identifying itself, so bundled and minified builds that strip the version banner are recognised weakly or missed altogether. A site can also load Prototype on a checkout or administrative path that a crawl of public pages never reaches. What appears here is a visible remainder of legacy code rather than a complete census of it, which makes the shape of the decline more reliable than the absolute figure.