[NikitaP]

Hi Jeremy,

The reason that the standalone version of jQuery is included into CloudSearch distribution is that it needs to work with X-Cart 4.4.0 - 4.6.0. Some older versions of X-Cart have older jQuery versions and even newer versions of jQuery can potentially break the code.

I wouldn't advise everyone to remove that included jQuery library. The more that performance gain is not that much - X-Cart's javascript optimization tool will combine all the .js into one file (there's no time spending on roundtrip for that single js file). But if it works for you, you can use it of course.

If I was running my own X-Cart site, I would probably have the same concern about duplicated libraries and I would probably try to get rid of that. But on the other hand the connector module should be robust enough to work in the diverse environment of different X-Cart versions (not to mention custom skins).

One of the solutions that would satisfy both sides is to load the dependencies asynchronously and conditionally. It will speed up the initial page load and will give us more control on what scripts must be loaded in some specific environment. It's planned.