Last week, Pippin Williamson published a post titled “Why Loading Your Own jQuery is Irresponsible.” This very issues was brought up tonight at the Seattle WordPress meetup, which led to a lively discussion and referenced Pippin’s post. Please, for the love of the WordPress community, just use the version of jQuery bundled in WordPress core…
However, if you’re going to load jQuery irresponsibly, don’t do it such a half hearted way by loading whichever version of jQuery is the latest at the time! Throw caution to the wind and use the new “Random jQuery” plugin! It loads a random version of jQuery from Google’s CDN with no fallback! It supports versions 1.2.3 all the way through 1.9.1! Also it will save people hours of work because rather than being forced to debug a theme that hard coded it’s own version of jQuery, troubleshooters can simply deactivate the plugin! It’s a win/win for everyone! Yes, I did just use an exclamation point at the end of every sentence in this entire paragraph!