Version 1.0.4, 2008-04-04
The JavaScript
Compares various popular JavaScript compression utilities.
As rich web applications are being built with larger JavaScript code bases, the need for JavaScript compression to keep bandwidth and page load times as small as possible is becoming more important for faster load times and more enjoyable user experiences.
There are many tools available that can help you compress your JavaScript code but it can be time consuming and difficult to analyze which tool works the best for a given situation. This web application shows aggregated statistics on the general level of compression in all these tools, and allows developers to easily play with and compare the different tools on their own JavaScript code without having to set up all the tools on their own.
The following compression tools are compared, both with and without the affects of additional gzip compression that are supported natively by modern web browsers.
- JSMin is a conservative compressor, written several years ago by Douglas Crockford. It is considered safe (especially if you verify your code with JSLint first-- an excellent thing to do anyway) because it doesn't attempt to change any variable names.
- Dojo shrinksafe is a very popular Java based JavaScript compressor that parses the JavaScript using the rhino library and crunches local variable names.
- Packer by Dean Edwards, is also a very popular JavaScript compressor, that can go beyond regular compression and also add advanced on-the-fly decompression with a JavaScript runtime piece.
- the YUI Compressor is a newer compressor written by Julien Lecomte, that aims to combine the safety of JSMin with the higher compression levels acheived by Dojo Shrinksafe. Like Dojo shrinksafe, it is written in Java and based on the rhino library.
NOTE: Large JavaScript files can take a long time to process. Please be patient!
Paste or type your JavaScript code here:
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