From file-loader's README: >Instructs webpack to emit the required object as file and to return its public URL From url-loader's README: >The url-loader work

From file-loader's README: >Instructs webpack to emit the required object as file and to return its public URL From url-loader's README: >The url-loader works like the file-loader, but can return a DataURL if the file is smaller than a byte limit. They are interchangeable, do the same thing, but url-loader can generate a dataUrl if the file is small, like an png/svg icon, so you can save one request where the latency could be higher than the download time. I think this feature should be built into file-loader and toggled via loader option.