top | item 38380185

(no title)

Doesn't really matter after compression unless the bulk of your code can be culled from the end product. Tbh the largest business value this has is slowing down people trying to use your internal APIs.

discuss

kibwen|2 years ago

It would be nice to have experimentally-derived numbers to point to in order to help people visualize whether or not minification actually improves compression to any significant degree.

tecleandor|2 years ago

Quick test I've done with some popular frameworks. I wonder if minification affects to parsing speed.

    +--------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------+
    |         Library          |  Size   | gzip -1 | gzip -9 | brotli |
    +--------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------+
    | bootstrap.css            |  280813 |   47312 |   33109 |  24533 |
    | bootstrap.min.css        |  232948 |   42003 |   30776 |  22695 |
    | react.development.js     |   87574 |   28733 |   23513 |  19818 |
    | react.development.min.js |   25612 |   10217 |    9224 |   8052 |
    | tailwind-2.2.19.css      | 3642321 |  376787 |  304100 |  82049 |
    | tailwind-2.2.19.min.css  | 2934019 |  354063 |  294632 |  72803 |
    | vue.global.js            |  476920 |  134655 |  105130 |  87121 |
    | vue.global.min.js        |  167898 |   74769 |   65582 |  57922 |
    +--------------------------+---------+---------+---------+--------+

Edit: something important to note: some frameworks (e.g. React) have lots of comments on their un-minified versions, that are removed when minified. That affects their size greatly.

TheMaskedCoder|2 years ago

Here's an old article: https://css-tricks.com/the-difference-between-minification-a...

In the example given:

Original - 147 KB

Minified - 123 KB (83%)

Gzipped - 22 KB (15%)

Both - 20KB (14%)

Compression is waaay more effective, so if you have to pick one, go with compressing. Is having readable source code worth the other 2KB? That's up to you. Source maps can do the same thing with less, though. Also, modern devtools have ways of de-minification (if you don't mind all the mangled variable names).

ruszki|2 years ago

I've seen the same thing with different jQuery versions: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3239125/is-there-any-poi...

At least with jQuery, it seems that minification matters considerably.

falserum|2 years ago

Can client/browser choose if to use compression? If so, this is a problem for the website

progval|2 years ago

Yes, HTTP Accept-Encoding