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0 pointsumvi2y ago0 comments

Most people aren't making webpages that need a quarter million lines of JS. For a normal sized webpage, difference between raw gzipped and minified gzipped is negligable.

Or maybe even "modern front end" hello world apps now need a quarter of a million lines because "modern" JS devs use super mega react typescript which installs 1000 npm dependencies and requires a 30 second "build" to generate a huge monolithic minified tree-shook js blob. I wouldn't know, I just use vanilla JS for my web pages.

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sebstefan2y ago

Okay. Let's move goalposts.

For a small file (github.com/runk/node-chardet, release version 0.7.0, index.js, 154lines, 4KiB)

Raw - 3.30 KiB

Minified - 2.05 KiB

Gz - 1.01 KiB

Minified+Gz - 0.81 KiB

That's a 25% reduction

Still huge. If minifying before gzipping multiples the size of my transfers by a factor between 0.75 and 0.40, I'm not skipping it for the one oddball that wants the sources in a human-readable format on the production environment

They can use the sourcemaps, or find the files on github

umviOP2y ago

Saving 200 bytes is "still huge"? For me 200 bytes is not worth the extra headaches minification introduces.

sebstefan2y ago

You're the one who complained my examples files were too big.

This is about the general discussion around minification. I don't care the specifics of your particular usecase.

The point is that it reduces filesizes even after gzip. You having an arbitrary threshold around 200 bytes is not interesting.

umviOP2y ago

My point is that for most people, the size savings of minification are going to be miniscule because most people are dealing with small JS files. Not only that but it makes debugging a much bigger pain. You start needing to generate and distribute map files, you can no longer easily observe or modify state from Dev console, etc.

I'm not completely opposed to minification. Distributing some self contained library like OpenCV.js? Minify away. But minifying everything even application files under active development just impedes developer velocity IMO for very little benefit. You shave off a couple hundred bytes in exchange for worse development/debugging and ostensibly faster page loads but realistically the same page loads.

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sebstefan2y ago

Okay. Let's move goalposts.

For a small file (github.com/runk/node-chardet, release version 0.7.0, index.js, 154lines, 4KiB)

Raw - 3.30 KiB

Minified - 2.05 KiB

Gz - 1.01 KiB

Minified+Gz - 0.81 KiB

That's a 25% reduction

They can use the sourcemaps, or find the files on github

umviOP2y ago

Saving 200 bytes is "still huge"? For me 200 bytes is not worth the extra headaches minification introduces.

sebstefan2y ago

You're the one who complained my examples files were too big.

This is about the general discussion around minification. I don't care the specifics of your particular usecase.

The point is that it reduces filesizes even after gzip. You having an arbitrary threshold around 200 bytes is not interesting.

umviOP2y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse