> If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN link is right on their site) then requiring jQuery will be effectively free because it will be in everyone's cache.
So create one massive target that needs to be breached to access massive numbers of websites around the world?
Imagine if every Windows PC ran code from a single web page on startup every time they started up. Now imagine if anything could be put in that code and it would be ran. How big of a target would that be?
While there are cases where the performance is worth using a CDN, there are plenty of reasons to not want to run foreign code.
(Now maybe we could add some security, like generating a hash of the code on the CDN and matching it with a value provided by the website and only running the code if the hashes matched. But there are still business risks even with that.)
Just so I understand, I pull the file and make a checksum, then hardcode it into the link to the resource in my own code? Then, when the client pulls my code, follows the link, checks the checksum against the one I included in the link.
So create one massive target that needs to be breached to access massive numbers of websites around the world?
Imagine if every Windows PC ran code from a single web page on startup every time they started up. Now imagine if anything could be put in that code and it would be ran. How big of a target would that be?
While there are cases where the performance is worth using a CDN, there are plenty of reasons to not want to run foreign code.
(Now maybe we could add some security, like generating a hash of the code on the CDN and matching it with a value provided by the website and only running the code if the hashes matched. But there are still business risks even with that.)