What is the dollar sign in Javascript, if not jQuery

Question

I did some javascript / jQuery programming a few years ago, and I just started up again. Back then the dollar sign was used for all the jQuery functionality, and if no jQuery library was imported, the dollar sign was not defined.

Today, I started up Firefox, in a completely empty html file with no javascript libraries, and yet the dollar sign points to something. If I open the Firefox console and type '$' I get "function()".

1) Is it correct that dollar sign was not assigned, a few years back, or do I remember wrong?

2) What is the dollar sign, if not jQuery?

Answer 1

1) Is it correct that dollar sign was not assigned, a few years back, or do I remember wrong?

That's correct and still true.

2) What is the dollar sign, if not jQuery?

Firefox and Chrome implement $, $$ and several others as helper commands. Both will set $$ to document.querySelectorAll(), and set $ to document.querySelector if window.$ hasn't been defined.

So what you're seeing isn't actually standard JavaScript, but a helper in the developer console of your browser. It's also not jQuery (as long as you're not on a page using jQuery). However, it's behaviour is close to the one of jQuery, concerning that querySelector (for single matches) and querySelectorAll (for multiple matches) give you almost the same strength as the jQuery selector.