Javascript [LWN.net]

Javascript

Posted Mar 14, 2013 15:40 UTC (Thu) by serzan (subscriber, #8155)
In reply to: Javascript by rfunk
Parent article: SCALE: The life and times of the AGPL

Indeed, minified js is meant to reduce download time *and* is trivially reversible (eg. with UglifyJS).

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Javascript

Posted Mar 14, 2013 16:59 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

The hilarious thing about the obsession with reducing resource sizes is that it often goes hand in hand with weighing down the average Web site with 20 different "parasite" resources, each providing things like "analytics", tracking, adverts, and even the actual JavaScript libraries that the site needs to "deliver its experience", so that the browser ends up hanging for ten seconds while today's bottleneck struggles to serve up JavaScript and other stuff that the offending site's developers were too cheap to host themselves (or too lazy to learn how to host themselves).

The Web has ended up as quite some distributed computing platform, where everyone ends up running programs for other people. It's just a shame that most of them are completely superfluous.

Javascript

Posted Mar 14, 2013 17:19 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Without getting into what's superfluous or not, I'd like to point out that, quite often, sites will load resources from outside servers in order to *speed up* the load. That can work for a combination of reasons:

1. If you've already been to a site that loads the resource from the same place, it's already in your cache and your browser doesn't bother loading it again.
2. Browsers have a small limit of how many resources they'll load from a single place at once, so loading some of them from an outside server increases the parallelism of the load.
3. The outside server may use a distributed content delivery network, so that you'll get the resource from a closer server than you otherwise would,

Javascript

Posted Mar 15, 2013 13:11 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> minified js ... is trivially reversible

This is not true. Even if one forgets about stripped comments function and variable names in JS may provide essential clues to the programmer especially when programming in a function style with a lot of closures. In minified JS where the names are replaced with short 1-2 letters strings and functions are reordered to improve the level of compression with gzip the clues are gone and it could be very hard to understand the code even after pretty-printing it.