The file size of jQuery

Question

On jQuery's official website, they say the minified file size is 18k, but after downloading, I found that is 53.9K, do I have to do something to compress it after downloading?

Answer 1

If you want to use less bandwidth both from your server, and to your visitors, you should let Google host jQuery for you. Reasons (from encosia.com):

• Decreased Latency
• Increased parallelism
• Better caching

Here is one way to do it. (The other way is with google.load(), see the link above):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function() {
    // Your code here
  });
</script>

Answer 2

The website states it's 18k minified and gzipped. So you need to setup your web server to compress JavaScript files to see that file size.