Two things: 1) The minified jquery script is ~100kb, for a script that is loaded once per website that's pretty tiny. Especially when you consider the fact tha

Two things: 1) The minified jquery script is ~100kb, for a script that is loaded once per website that's pretty tiny. Especially when you consider the fact that the latency involved with opening the network connection to fetch the file will likely exceed the time required to pull the file down. Once you've initiated the download the difference between pulling down 20kb and 100kb isn't all that much. 2) You can use the google jquery file reference. That means a big % of your site visitors will already have the cached script in memory, and for those that don't the download will be pretty speedy given that it can be fetched from the google domain in the background (while the rest of your site assets are being fetched by the browser).