jQuery vs document.querySelectorAll

document.querySelectorAll() has several inconsistencies across browsers and is not supported in older browsers^{This probably won’t cause any trouble anymore nowadays}. It has a very unintuitive scoping mechanism and some other not so nice features. Also with javascript you have a harder time working with the result sets of these queries, which in many cases you might want to do. jQuery provides functions to work on them like: filter(), find(), children(), parent(), map(), not() and several more. Not to mention the jQuery ability to work with pseudo-class selectors.

However, I would not consider these things as jQuery’s strongest features but other things like “working” on the dom (events, styling, animation & manipulation) in a crossbrowser compatible way or the ajax interface.

If you only want the selector engine from jQuery you can use the one jQuery itself is using: Sizzle That way you have the power of jQuerys Selector engine without the nasty overhead.

EDIT:
Just for the record, I’m a huge vanilla JavaScript fan. Nonetheless it’s a fact that you sometimes need 10 lines of JavaScript where you would write 1 line jQuery.

Of course you have to be disciplined to not write jQuery like this:

$('ul.first').find('.foo').css('background-color', 'red').end().find('.bar').css('background-color', 'green').end();

This is extremely hard to read, while the latter is pretty clear:

$('ul.first')
   .find('.foo')
      .css('background-color', 'red')
.end()
   .find('.bar')
      .css('background-color', 'green')
.end();

The equivalent JavaScript would be far more complex illustrated by the pseudocode above:

1) Find the element, consider taking all element or only the first.

// $('ul.first')
// taking querySelectorAll has to be considered
var e = document.querySelector("ul.first");

2) Iterate over the array of child nodes via some (possibly nested or recursive) loops and check the class (classlist not available in all browsers!)

//.find('.foo')
for (var i = 0;i<e.length;i++){
     // older browser don't have element.classList -> even more complex
     e[i].children.classList.contains('foo');
     // do some more magic stuff here
}

3) apply the css style

// .css('background-color', 'green')
// note different notation
element.style.backgroundColor = "green" // or
element.style["background-color"] = "green"

This code would be at least two times as much lines of code you write with jQuery. Also you would have to consider cross-browser issues which will compromise the severe speed advantage (besides from the reliability) of the native code.