Worth it to use jQuery UI hosted by Google?

Question

So I heard good reasons why to use the jquery hosted on google because of caching. But I am not sure about jQuery UI though.

I am guessing that the jQuery UI file hosted on google has every single extension and plugin (such as Draggable, etc).

So is that not kind of a waste if say your only using only jQuery UI tabs? to get all that other stuff with it.

Also I see they have some of the templates up for the css files. I am guessing the caching would be the main advantage of using the hosted file.

Answer 1

It's worth it. The blog post for jQuery's last update used the word "performance" more than any other -- and for good reason. The library isn't small, so performance can be a problem.

Hosting your .js on Google is one way to count on jQuery being the lingua franca of the JavaScript world and it could save you valuable download time in browser. Remember, scripts block parallel downloads so any time your user spends downloading the .js from you is time they can't spend downloading something else.

The downfall is that Google could perhaps go down, but there's already industry talk about redundancy and roll-over servers to mitigate that concern.