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Why does Bing obfuscate their JavaScript?

Asked 2009-07-01T18:01:43.003
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I was surfing the web, as usual and I wanted to take a look at Bing's source code because I was curious and wanted to know what they were using to make their image fade in. I was surprised by what could only be qualified by the following line :

Holy wall of text!

And it made me wonder if there is any advantage to obfuscate your (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript like this? To reduce the size of the file perhaps?


Edit : After looking around, I realized this was a pretty common practice. Never looked at it from a minification point of view before!

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I would bet the main reason they do this is to reduce the file size. Smaller files makes the page load faster.

Obfuscating is not as important. Also, it can make things a pain to debug, depending on how you do it.

Speed is everything in search.

answered 2009-07-01T18:06:16.007

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