Our blog post ‘Test Drive of the Google Hosted Ajax Libraries‘ looked at using Google’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve up commonly used libraries such as jQuery and Prototype.

One significant advantage, that we found, was that downloading a library from a different hostname (i.e. ajax.googleapis.com) helps to avoid the HTTP connection limiting behavior that causes blocking in browsers:

There are other significant advantages to using Google hosted libraries:

• The libraries are hosted on Google’s high speed global network providing fast access from most locations world wide
• HTTP compression minimizes the size of the download
• Minimized versions of the each library are available to further reduce download size
• The library that your site uses may already be in the user’s browser cache if the user has visited another site that uses the Google hosted libraries
• You can specify which version of a library should be used with a hard coded URL or allow for automatic version upgrades using the google.load() function
• Google picks up the bandwidth bill for the hosted Javascript libraries

However, there was one issue that stopped us using the Google CDN. Its lack of HTTPS support caused this warning to be generated on secure pages:

The good news is that Google has added SSL support and we were able to change the script tag on our Ajax Demo page to:

<script type="text/javascript"
src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js">
</script>

So, you can now have all the performance benefits of the Google CDN without the userability issues on secure pages.