Minification still offers a substantial savings. The following file size stats are from jquery 1.6.0 just now pulled from google's urls: Uncompressed (normal:

Minification still offers a substantial savings. The following file size stats are from jquery 1.6.0 just now pulled from google's urls: Uncompressed (normal:minified) 232651:90518 Gzip -6 (normal:minified) 66778:31610 Gzip -1 (normal:minified): 81986:36633 gzip -9 only saves a few hundred bytes on each vs default compression level of 6. bzip2 and xz do not achieve dramatic reductions of the readable jquery code either; the normal:minified ratio is slightly improved, but is still approx. 2:1.