I wanted the browser to just ship jQuery. Cross-Origin Storage came for rescue

Early in my career I had an idea I thought was obvious. Almost every site on the web was loading jQuery. The same file, over and over, millions of times a day, across the whole internet. Why didn’t Chrome just include it? Ship the file with the browser, save the world a mountain of bandwidth, move on. Nobody I said this to was impressed, and the idea falls apart the moment you poke at it. Which version do you ship? What about the next one? Do you also ship Bootstrap, Lodash, Angular? Where does it stop? But the instinct behind it was right. There’s a proposal in the Web Platform Incubator Community Group that arrives at roughly the same destination by a much better route. It’s called Cross-Origin Storage. My idea was built already. We called it a CDN The web had already solved this, in its own way. For years the standard advice was to load your libraries from a public CDN. Link jQuery from Google’s copy, link Bootstrap from a shared host, and everybody wins. The browser cache was…