If you’re like me and feel like writing Javascript without JQuery to be kind of like coding with one hand, you’ll be pleased to know that the JQuery team has released a beta version of JQuery 1.3 for people to test and give feedback on.
John Resig mentioned in a podcast with Scott Hanselman a few months back that one of the primary goals of the 1.3 release was to increase performance and a quick glance at the important changes listd in this release, specifically rewrites of big parts JQuery like the selector engine, seem to allude to this.
A quick run of the Javascript library benchmark app at http://experiment.bcse.info/slickspeed/ on my machine using Chrome shows a *significant* performance increase in JQuery 1.3b1 versus 1.2.6 (final time of 13ms compared to 26ms, so about a 100% speedup overall).
