Ways to compress/minify javascript files [duplicate]

Answer 1

Yahoo's compressor, for a combination of safety, and decent compression.

It uses a real JavaScript parser, rather than using a set of regular expressions. It is able to do the same kind of variable renaming that Packer can, but is much safer. It won't break if you forget to put a semicolon at the end of a function definition.

Packer does have an encoding feature that generates an even smaller file. However, it's only effective if your web server does not support gzip or deflate compression. With gzip / deflate, YUI and Packer generate files that are about the same size.

Answer 2

I use YUICompressor exclusively because it intelligently minifies removing whitespace and reducing internal variables down whilst maintaining external refs properly and has yet to break my code and it also does CSS to boot!

After that we serve up on a GZip HTTP connection and voila!

Answer 3

Changing the server settings to use gzip compression, then you get compression on any text file, javascript, html, etc. You also won't get the decompression lag that you get with compressed javascript on each page load.