Are people really referencing jquery from other servers in production environmen...

adventured · on July 13, 2013

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)

toble · on July 13, 2013

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.

eps · on July 13, 2013

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

toble · on July 13, 2013

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.

amalag · on July 13, 2013

http://cdnjs.com/

shocks · on July 13, 2013

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

andybak · on July 13, 2013

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

eps · on July 13, 2013

And also dragging every visitor of your website along.

EzGraphs · on July 13, 2013

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.

dclowd9901 · on July 16, 2013

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.