Google To Host Ajax Libraries

ruphus13 writes "So, hosting and managing a ton of Ajax calls, even when working with mootools, dojo or scriptaculous, can be quite cumbersome, especially as they get updated, along with your code. In addition, several sites now use these libraries, and the end-user has to download the library each time. Google now will provide hosted versions of these libraries, so users can simply reference Google's hosted version. From the article, 'The thing is, what if multiple sites are using Prototype 1.6? Because browsers cache files according to their URL, there is no way for your browser to realize that it is downloading the same file multiple times. And thus, if you visit 30 sites that use Prototype, then your browser will download prototype.js 30 times. Today, Google announced a partial solution to this problem that seems obvious in retrospect: Google is now offering the "Google Ajax Libraries API," which allows sites to download five well-known Ajax libraries (Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mootools, and jQuery) from Google. This will only work if many sites decide to use Google's copies of the JavaScript libraries; if only one site does so, then there will be no real speed improvement. There is, of course, something of a privacy violation here, in that Google will now be able to keep track of which users are entering various non-Google Web pages.' Will users adopt this, or is it easy enough to simply host an additional file?"

Comments

Re:solution in search of a problem

[causality]

The "problem" already exists. It's "how can we collect more data about user's browsing habits?" You have to consider that Google is a for-profit business and hosting these files represents a bandwidth cost and a maintainence cost for them. They are unlikely to do this unless they believe that they can turn that into a profit, and the mechanism available to them is advertising revenue.

This is very similar to the purpose of the already-existing google-analytics.com. I block this site in my hosts file (among others) and I take other measures because I feel that if a corporation wants to take my data and profit from it, they first need to negotiate with me. Since Google is not going to do that, I refuse to contribute my data. To the folks who say "well how else are they supposed to make money" I say that I am not responsible for the success of someone else's business model, they are free to deny me access to their search engine if they so choose, and I would also point out that Google is not exactly struggling to turn a profit.

The "something of a privacy violation" mentioned in the summary seems to be the specific purpose.

dependence on Google is but one problem

[SuperBanana]

Yeah, but what if Google decides that nobody is using these -- or they can't legally host them for whatever reason -- or they just decide that they don't want to do this anymore?

Think broader. What happens when:

• Google decides to wrap more than just the promised functionality into it? For example, maybe "display a button" turns into "display a button and report usage stats"?
• Google gets hacked and malicious Javascript is included?

But, yes- you're right. This is a scary new dependency. For a company full of PhD geniuses supposedly Doing No Evil, nobody at Google seems to understand how dangerous they are to the health of the web. In fact, I'd suggest they do, and they don't care- because they seem hell-bent on making everything on the web touch/use/rely upon Google in some way. This is no exception.

A lot of folks don't even realize how Google is slowly weaning open-source projects into relying on them, too (with Google Summer of Code.)

Re:solution in search of a problem

[causality]

Do you actually have to block it in your hosts file in order to effectively deny them information? I have it blacklisted in NoScript -- is that sufficient? I'd always thought it was called via Javascript.

The file is indeed Javascript and it's called "urchin.js" (nice name eh?). Personally, I use the hosts file because I don't care to even have my IP address showing up in their access logs. This isn't necessarily because I think that would be a bad thing, but it's because I don't see what benefit there would be for me and, as others have mentioned, the additional DNS query and traffic that would take place could only slow down the rendering of a given Web page.

I also use NoScript, AdBlock, RefControl and others. RefControl is nice because the HTTP Referrer is another way that sites can track your browsing; before Google Analytics it was common for many pages to include a one-pixel graphic from a common third-party host for this reason. Just bear in mind that some sites (especially some shopping-cart systems) legitimately use the referrer so you may need to add those sites to RefControl's exception list in order to shop there, as the default is to populate the referrer with the site's own homepage no matter what the actual referrer would have been.

Re:solution in search of a problem

[alta]

I don't see what benefit there would be for me There are benefits, they just may not be as direct as you like, or appreciated.

We use analiytics. We use it almost exclusively to improve the experience of our customers. We don't care how many people come to our site. We care how many buy... and we have internal reports for that. What we do care about is:
How many people are not using IE. (We found it was worth making sure all pages worked on most all.

How many people are at 1280*1024 or over.
We dropped the notion that we needed to program for 800*600, thereby letting people use more of those big ass screens they buy.

Where are most of the people located?
We now have an east coast and west coast server.

What pages are most viewed?
We made them easier to get to.

Who doesn't have flash?
It was 2.08%, but I'm still not going to let them put flash on my site.