Mootools is not an ancestor of jQuery, it actually was released after jQuery (by a few days). From what I recall, the success of jQuery was not because it allo

Mootools is not an ancestor of jQuery, it actually was released after jQuery (by a few days). From what I recall, the success of jQuery was not because it allowed to do more things. It was mainly because developers by then considered javascript as a lower citizen language and wanted to do frontend stuff without having to learn javascript - and jQuery allowed just that. For (the few) javascript lovers, jQuery main advantage was to be a big decorator, not extending any native, which guaranteed there will be no conflict with other libraries when adding jQuery in a page (quite ironic, when you see how all libraries expect jQuery may be present in the page, nowadays).