Vanilla JS

Vanilla JS is a fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework
for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications.

Introduction

The Vanilla JS team maintains every byte of code in the framework and works hard each day to make sure it is small and intuitive. Who's using Vanilla JS? Glad you asked! Here are a few:

Facebook
Google
YouTube
Yahoo
Wikipedia
Windows Live
Twitter
Amazon
LinkedIn
MSN

eBay
Microsoft
Tumblr
Apple
Pinterest
PayPal
Reddit
Netflix
Stack Overflow

In fact, Vanilla JS is already used on more websites than jQuery, Prototype JS, MooTools, YUI, and Google Web Toolkit - combined.

Download

Ready to try Vanilla JS? Choose exactly what you need!

Core Functionality

Final size: 0 bytes uncompressed, 25 bytes gzipped. Show human-readable sizes

Testimonials

Getting Started

The Vanilla JS team takes pride in the fact that it is the most lightweight framework available anywhere; using our production-quality deployment strategy, your users' browsers will have Vanilla JS loaded into memory before it even requests your site.

To use Vanilla JS, just put the following code anywhere in your application's HTML:

<script src="path/to/vanilla.js"></script>

When you're ready to move your application to a production deployment, switch to the much faster method:

That's right - no code at all. Vanilla JS is so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade.

Speed Comparison

Here are a few examples of just how fast Vanilla JS really is:

Retrieve DOM element by ID

	Code	ops / sec
Vanilla JS	document.getElementById('test-table');	12,137,211
Dojo	dojo.byId('test-table');	5,443,343
Prototype JS	$('test-table')	2,940,734
Ext JS	delete Ext.elCache['test-table']; Ext.get('test-table');	997,562
jQuery	$jq('#test-table');	350,557
YUI	YAHOO.util.Dom.get('test-table');	326,534
MooTools	document.id('test-table');	78,802

Retrieve DOM elements by tag name

	Code	ops / sec
Vanilla JS	document.getElementsByTagName("span");	8,280,893
Prototype JS	Prototype.Selector.select('span', document);	62,872
YUI	YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsBy(function(){return true;},'span');	48,545
Ext JS	Ext.query('span');	46,915
jQuery	$jq('span');	19,449
Dojo	dojo.query('span');	10,335
MooTools	Slick.search(document, 'span', new Elements);	5,457

Code Examples

Here are some examples of common tasks in Vanilla JS and other frameworks:

Fade an element out and then remove it

Vanilla JS	var s = document.getElementById('thing').style; s.opacity = 1; (function fade(){(s.opacity-=.1)<0?s.display="none":setTimeout(fade,40)})();
jQuery	<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script> $('#thing').fadeOut(); </script>

Make an AJAX call

Vanilla JS	var r = new XMLHttpRequest(); r.open("POST", "path/to/api", true); r.onreadystatechange = function () { if (r.readyState != 4 \|\| r.status != 200) return; alert("Success: " + r.responseText); }; r.send("banana=yellow");
jQuery	<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script> $.ajax({ type: 'POST', url: "path/to/api", data: "banana=yellow", success: function (data) { alert("Success: " + data); }, }); </script>