Raw: 11 403KiB
Raw gzipped: 1 881 KiB
Minified: 3 543 KiB
Minified gzipped: 865 Kib
A 2.17x reduction between the two gzips
Even with GZip, minification is huge
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.
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
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.
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.