Google has just announced that it now provides a free, hosted copy of a many common AJAX Javascript libraries through Google AJAX Libraries API.  This has huge implications for speed and caching for users hitting sites which utilise these libraries:

  • Google automatically serves them up in Gzip format (if your browser supports this)
  • Caching is done by Google – you only have to load a copy once, and it can be used at many sites!
  • The servers are really quick
  • The servers are physically “close” to users (utilising the Google network)
  • They are minified

This is very exciting development, as I use many of these libraries in my applications – and the speed they load direct impacts all users of the software I develop.