They mention (in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture#JavaScriptMinifier https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture#J... )

They mention (in https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture#JavaScriptMinifier https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture#J... ) that even with the cache, they can't afford a stronger minifier. Don't get me wrong, I really like the "just ship less code" approach to making apps fast. I am just shocked that running a processor on the code that they do ship to make it smaller was not one of the first things they tried. (Disclaimer: I work in this space and have even tinkered with writing such a tool. http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2019/04/js-minifiers.html http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2019/04/js-minifiers.html )