Why am I able to use jQuery syntax in Chrome's JS console when current page doesn't have jQuery loaded?

Question

I thought one has to have jQuery source loaded first in order to use $ to target elements. I was on a webpage that doesn\'t even include any scripts but somehow

Answer 1

As already alluded to in the comments by @Shmiddty, it is likely due to a plugin you have installed...

You can find out by running developer tools, select 'Sources' and look at both the Sources and Content Scripts panes - is something suspiciously like jQuery in there somewhere?

Answer 2

Before, Chrome had an alias to document.getElementById with the $ variable.

Recently (probably on Chrome 23 release), it has been changed to an alias to document.querySelector.

So your code is the equivalent of document.querySelector('body').