Thursday, April 09, 2009

Is jQuery safe?

A post on the jQuery-English Google Group this morning asked is jQuery safe, was it infected with a virus?  This seemed like an odd question.  I brought it up with the jQuery team and Rey Bango, part of the jQuery Evangelism team , offered some sound advice for making sure that jQuery is safe for you to use.

1) Virus Scanner Reported Something: In some instances, anti-virus programs have reported a false positive on packed versions of various libraries in jQuery. It's definitely a false positive and not a virus in any way.

2) The jQuery downloads are basically text files that we manage & the project has been active for 3 years now. We have a tremendous number of large scale users leveraging jQuery so you can rest assured you're in good company. You can see a list of them here:

http://docs.jquery.com/Sites_Using_jQuery

One way to ensure that jQuery is safe is to download the library from a trusted source like the jquery.com servers.  But if that's not enough level of trust you can also download/link to the library from Googles AJAX Libraries API's site where Google hosts jQuery, jQuery UI, prototype, mootools and others.  Google independently inspects each release before releasing it to it's users. 

Rey continues with official places to download jQuery:


Please only download jQuery from the official site or use the version hosted on Google's CDN. Here are the official site links:

http://jquery.com/
http://code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/
http://jqueryui.com/ (for the jQuery UI library)
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/

Downloading jQuery from any site other than the ones listed above is not recommended as we can't guarantee the validity of the code.

I hope this post will confirm to those questioning if jQuery is safe to use that it is indeed safe for use and how to ensure your experience is enjoyable.

Update: Rey posted a similar blog post on his site as well.

# Thursday, April 9 2009 at 9:51 AM | Comments [0]
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