Steven Levithan writes about JavaScript and regular expressions, including trim performance, the RegExp API, and parsing tricks.
HN links it as a regex resource, especially his parseUri script, JavaScript trim benchmarks, and a phone number validation post.
Of course it's not the only way, have you seen Google's homepage?
Also, JScript is actually surprising good and is nothing like the DOM or CSS, AFAIK the only known bugs are Named Function Expressions being parsed as Function Declarations (http://kangax.github.com/nfe/#jscript-bugs), and a couple RegExp bugs (http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/category/cross-browser).
I suppose if you count DOM bugs, like the memory leak, that's a problem. That's where jQuery is amazingly helpful(and presumably other libraries like it).
Considering Raphael is as slow as excanvas in IE (but much faster in other browsers), it's probably IE's fault, not excanvases.
As others have suggested, jQuery is overkill for this.
The best lightweight js library I've found/used in the past is parseUri:
http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/parseuri
Obviously, if you only need to analyze the current URL, you can use window/document.location, but there are times when you want to parse a URI for a page you aren't on. For instance, if you are analyzing har data, and want to break URI "components" into columns so they are sortable.
Kudos!
Looks like the performance improvements are aided by the new native methods in the latest browsers. I wonder at what point they will stop supporting older browsers like IE6.
Here is the article on different JavaScript trim methods: http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/faster-trim-javascript
Someone who offers three solutions to mimic lookbehind's in Javascript:
http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/mimic-lookbehind-javascript/comment-page-1
Also, there seems to also be a lot of support for leveraging PHP's regex functionality on the server-side to accomplish this.
(http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/validate-phone-number)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbering_plan)
https://www.regular-expressions.info/
and
https://blog.stevenlevithan.com/