Short & Snazzy:

+ new Date()

A unary operator like plus triggers the valueOf method in the Date object and it returns the timestamp (without any alteration).

Details:

On almost all current browsers you can use Date.now() to get the UTC timestamp in milliseconds; a notable exception to this is IE8 and earlier (see compatibility table).

You can easily make a shim for this, though:

if (!Date.now) {
    Date.now = function() { return new Date().getTime(); }
}

To get the timestamp in seconds, you can use:

Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000)

Or alternatively you could use:

Date.now() / 1000 | 0

Which should be slightly faster, but also less readable.
(also see this answer or this with further explaination to bitwise operators).

I would recommend using Date.now() (with compatibility shim). It's slightly better because it's shorter & doesn't create a new Date object. However, if you don't want a shim & maximum compatibility, you could use the "old" method to get the timestamp in milliseconds:

new Date().getTime()

Which you can then convert to seconds like this:

Math.round(new Date().getTime()/1000)

And you can also use the valueOf method which we showed above:

new Date().valueOf()

Timestamp in Milliseconds

var timeStampInMs = window.performance && window.performance.now && window.performance.timing && window.performance.timing.navigationStart ? window.performance.now() + window.performance.timing.navigationStart : Date.now();

console.log(timeStampInMs, Date.now());

Update: June-2021

For a specific case when you need all query params:

const urlSearchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
const params = Object.fromEntries(urlSearchParams.entries());

Update: Sep-2018

You can use URLSearchParams which is simple and has decent (but not complete) browser support.

const urlParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
const myParam = urlParams.get('myParam');

Original

You don't need jQuery for that purpose. You can use just some pure JavaScript:

function getParameterByName(name, url = window.location.href) {
    name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, '\\$&');
    var regex = new RegExp('[?&]' + name + '(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)'),
        results = regex.exec(url);
    if (!results) return null;
    if (!results[2]) return '';
    return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
}

Usage:

// query string: ?foo=lorem&bar=&baz
var foo = getParameterByName('foo'); // "lorem"
var bar = getParameterByName('bar'); // "" (present with empty value)
var baz = getParameterByName('baz'); // "" (present with no value)
var qux = getParameterByName('qux'); // null (absent)

NOTE: If a parameter is present several times (?foo=lorem&foo=ipsum), you will get the first value (lorem). There is no standard about this and usages vary, see for example this question: Authoritative position of duplicate HTTP GET query keys.

NOTE: The function is case-sensitive. If you prefer case-insensitive parameter name, add 'i' modifier to RegExp

NOTE: If you're getting a no-useless-escape eslint error, you can replace name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, '\\$&'); with name = name.replace(/[[\]]/g, '\\$&').

This is an update based on the new URLSearchParams specs to achieve the same result more succinctly. See answer titled "URLSearchParams" below.