Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CydeWeys 3294 days ago
Can't you whitelist the specific jQuery library on Google's CDN though?

Serving widely used libraries out of a CDN is a best practice for a reason. Most visitors will already have it in cache. What alternative are you supposing? Local hosting? That has drawbacks, including more cache misses and increased bandwidth costs for the website provider.
4 comments
mabcat 3294 days ago
It's not always the user doing the blocking. A lot of sites broke for me when I was in China because they were trying to fetch resources from Google's CDN, which is/was blocked there.
link
CydeWeys 3294 days ago
Surely the primary blame there lies in China's censorship of the Internet, no? Isn't it just assumed that if you're traveling to China you need to be using a VPN in order to have the web as you're used to it work normally?
link
gub09 3294 days ago
No doubt Google considers it a best practice, because they are in the business of knowing what people do on the internet. How often will a browser get the jquery for a particular website or check with the CDN? There are a lot of jquery versions in use, the cache gets deleted (often on browser close) or expires, cache-age=0, etc. Almost always?

Besides providing jquery themselves, websites can use a CDN from another provider. OK, that might cost an extra 20 ms.

link
arcticfox 3294 days ago
Right, but then Google can leverage their CDN to track you, whether or not you also let them show you ads through normal channels. Ideally people would use a CDN not built to track people around.

Presumably once Google traps you into an unblockable ad channel (on mobile or whatever) they will unleash the tracking they've been doing on you.

link
notyourwork 3294 days ago
It's really not as beneficial as it sounds in theory. Sites uses different versions of these libraries. You would be better serving a single minified asset that is cached for your users.
link