Does minified javascript improve performance?

Question

I\'m making an AIR application (so download time doesn\'t have a huge impact), does combining and minifing all the javascript files affect the performance? How would obfusca

Answer 1

I'd like to post this as a separate answer as it somewhat contrasts the accepted one:

Yes, it does make a performance difference as it reduces parsing time - and that's often the critical thing. For me, it was even just simply linear in the size and I could get it from 12s to 4s parse time by minifying from 3MB to 1MB.

It's not a big app either, it just has a couple of reasonable dependencies.

So the moral of the story here is: Yes, minifying is important for performance - and not because of bandwidth, but because of parsing.