If we see good usage, we can work with browser vendors to automatically ship these libraries. Then, if they see the URLs that we use, they could auto load the libraries, even special JIT’d ones, from their local system. Thus, no network hit at all!
Sign in with 
OpenID
I hope Google will never do that.
JS librairies are here because standards are not consistent across browsers. It's a temporary solution for a real world problem. The key is to solve the problem while librairies help people. That said, Google should work with browser vendors to improve standards compliance and implementation of new standards.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your comment, Rik, but that's a pretty limited view of Javascript frameworks.
Google doesn't need to push standards. Standard compliance is improving already and the lifespan of browser versions is at the shortest I've seen since the 1990s. Users frequently upgrade Safari, Opera and Firefox so the number of legacy versions for those browsers is low and shrinking, IE7 is chipping away at IE6 ... which is an improvement.
I think these are all good signs for web development (including Dion's comment), its tools are maturing and being taken seriously.
Not too many years ago, Javascript was considered by many a toy language that you could use to make the browsing experience worse.
huxley - 29th May 2008 19:35 - #
I'm just saying this is not a good idea. JS librairies are just a pragmatic solution for today. With better standard support, I hope they will disappear. With Google intentions, there's no extra downloads, but there still be more JS code to be executed. And this is not good. Native code is better for the features in librairies (consistent behaviour across browsers, fancy effects, ...).
> JS libraries are just a pragmatic solution for today. With better standard support, I hope they will disappear.
I’ve never used a JavaScript library, so I’m probably ill-informed. But my understanding of JavaScript libraries is that they don’t just smooth out browser inconsistencies. They also wrap up useful functionality so that you don’t have to write it—much like Python modules, or the Cocoa framework for Objective-C.
I can’t see this ever going away. It hasn’t in other languages.