Back in 2008 I pointed out that many jQuery fans were including the framework with a “latest version” reference like this:
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.pack.js"></script>The other news of the day was that the Dimensions plugin had been merged into the core framework starting with jQuery 1.2.6 — the release notes confirm “Dimensions Plugin is Now Part of Core”, along with performance improvements. That merge made sense: it killed a popular third-party dependency by folding its functionality in.
Eighteen years later the irony is that the “latest” include itself became the anti-pattern. jQuery froze jquery-latest at version 1.11.1 (2014) and no longer recommends it — yet sites still load it to this day. Hard-coding an unpinned, frozen URL meant you could never plan an upgrade, and you inherited whatever the CDN served.
The modern practice is to pin an exact version on a CDN (jQuery 4.0.0 shipped in January 2026, the first major release since 2016):
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-4.0.0.min.js"></script>Even better, install it through your package manager and let your bundler handle it. Pin your dependencies — “latest” is never a version.