Minification reduces the size of the source code, making its transmission over a network (e.g. the Internet) more efficient.
However, to achieve its goals, minification sometimes uses techniques also used by obfuscation; for example, shortening variable names and refactoring the source code.
[5] In 2018, Terser has been forked from uglify-es[6][7] and has gained momentum since; in 2020 it outstripped UglifyJS when measured in daily downloads.
The original format was created by Joseph Schorr as part of the Closure Inspector minification project.
JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) resources may be minified, preserving their behavior while considerably reducing their file size.