Javascript minification seems like a classic case of premature optimization. I'm not a front-end developer so maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't simple, transparent gzip compression via your webserver — one line in a config file — get you something like ~90% of the benefits of minification, for free?
I'm sure there are some additional gains to be made from knowing the syntactical structure of the language you're minifying, since no generic compression scheme can know that. But that seems really marginal — and, as the article in question shows, opens up potential security vulns.
I'm sure there are some additional gains to be made from knowing the syntactical structure of the language you're minifying, since no generic compression scheme can know that. But that seems really marginal — and, as the article in question shows, opens up potential security vulns.