Two years ago (May 2006), I was writing the following about the Future of web browsers:

I don’t know if I’m simply day-dreaming, but I guess that future browsers will offer full support for updatable JS libraries.

Thus, no more SCRIPT tag for loading Prototype and other AJAX / Effects libraries.

Why? Because web concepts are exploding quite fast nowadays, and simply having support for ECMA script is not enough. Plus these libraries are getting to be widely used, thus a question comes up: why should we download 200kb off every website we visit, which are the same 200kb every time? 200kb is not that much when you’re using at least a Cable connection, but what about DialUp ?

I may not have time to go into building an extension for Firefox, but one that searches through SCRIPT tags and replaces those connecting to Prototype, Rico, etc with locally hosted files… that would be nice, right?

Today, I read how Google Hosts Popular Javascript Libraries and gives access to them through its CDN, the same way YUI is distributed through Yahoo! CDN since February 2007.

Read the rest of this entry »