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colinm

Probably 4kB more than loading jQuery from cache :)

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Yep. But with jQuery, the browser parse 91kb of JS, this is the difference...

Sort of, many modern JS engines use lazy parsing, so don't actually parse the contents of a function until it's needed.

Are people really referencing jquery from other servers in production environments?

Yes, it's extremely common to call jQuery from, for example, Google's googleapis.com domain.

Here's a quick sampling from a random group of top sites:

stackoverflow.com (googleapis.com), kickstarter.com (googleapis.com), cnn.com (their own cdn), businessinsider.com (jquery.com), foxnews.com (their own cdn), nbcnews.com (aspnetcdn.com), espn.com (espncdn.com), tumblr.com (secure.assets.tumblr.com), lastfm.com (googleapis.com), lyricsmode.com (googleapis.com), reference.com (sfdict.com, cdn for ask etc), qz.com (googleapis.com), theverge.com (googleapis.com), ehow.com (googleapis.com), wikia.com (googleapis.com), chacha.com (googleapis.com)

Just a passing tinfoil comment... Google has so many fingers in the analytics pie, if you're not being recorded by Adsense or Analytics, then there's always CDN.

No idea if it's all linked up, but it means that using alternative search engines doesn't really matter if you still visit Google-enhanced destinations.

Of course it's all linked up, including other freebies such as Google Fonts. Why else would they be offering it for free.

If you're not paying for it then you are the product.

Or you're walking into an exchange of value with your eyes fully open.

And also dragging every visitor of your website along.

If that's the case then maybe it would be better for society if we all started self hosted these sorts of resources. Longer load times, more bandwidth usage but better privacy for the public.

http://cdnjs.com/

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network.

Use of these (to serve static content) reduces your server traffic/load and gives a faster response times to users in different geographical regions.

I definitely understand the benefit. I also understand the very serious drawbacks of not hosting content that you own. Compared to an initial load time that borders on completely negligible, I'd rather guarantee safety of user information and not having downtime coincide with the shared cdn.

That was what I was thinking. What's the selling point since jQuery is already cached?

At one time jquery wasnt cached... and when you want to use a new version of jquery, there goes your cache anyways.

Doesnt seem like a really big argument against, especially considering the size of the library for the first non-cache hit

On average > 50% of visitors have an empty cache.

Let's hope this one will soon just be a cache hit as well then ;)

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