I’m interested in understanding all the selector engine code. In order to watch the development from the most basic to the quickest, I wanted to gather all the data points. Take a look, as you can see, Jack Slocum was definitely right when he said “selector processing power has gone from Pinto power to a Mustang GT 500.”

• 2003.03.25: document.getElementsBySelector() by Simon Willison (later used in behaviour.js) [source]
• 2004.04.10: CssQuery() 1.0: by Dean Edwards [source]
• 2005.08.19: CssQuery() 2.0. [source]
• 2005.08.22: jSelect (precursor to jQuery) [source]
• 2006.01.14: jQuery first release. [source]
• 2006.01.18: Prototype. Initial release of selector engine. [source]
• 2006.04.04: moo.dom (precursor to mootools) [source]
• 2006.08.26: jQuery 1.0 [source]
• 2006.11.14: Mochikit Selector. (orig. ported from prototype) [source]
• 2007.01.08: jQuery 1.1a (“10-20x faster than 1.0”) [source]
• 2007.01.11: DomQuery by Jack Slocum (ExtJS). [source]
• 2007.02.05: dojo.query(). [source]
• 2007.03.21: base2.DOM. [source]
• 2007.05.01: Prototype 1.5.1 [source]
• 2007.05.07: Mootools 1.1 [source]
• 2007.07.01: jQuery 1.1.3 (“800% faster”) [source]
• 2007.07.10: Ext 1.1 RC1 [source]
• 2007.07.10: Dojo 0.9 [source]
• 2007.12.04: YUI 2.4.0 [source]
• 2007.12.17: NWMatcher by Diego Perini [source]

Interactive Timeline

Update: Added Base2, CssQuery1.0. Corrected jQuery launch date.
Update: Added Dojo 0.9, NWMatcher.

Leave a comment if I left anything out.