Even on your example of a typical Indian 256kbps circuit, a 700k update is only about 20s. http://www25.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=700+kilobytes/256+kbps An

Even on your example of a typical Indian 256kbps circuit, a 700k update is only about 20s. http://www25.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=700+kilobytes/256+kbps And it's going to happen in the background anyway. jQuery (as per jQuery.com) is nearly 20k minified and gzipped. So they have gone from 35 jQuery downloads to 3.5 jQuery downloads. The 10x factor is impressive, but in absolute terms I don't think it's really that noticeable. "Today's Internet" is the one with jQuery, YouTube, Netflix streaming, last.fm, Flickr, and GMail. It's the one where most of us can get multiple mbps, or at least several hundred kbps, to our homes. It's the one where we dont notice the difference between 70k and 700k. It's actually quite nice. :-)