Minifiers also reduce variable and function names to a minimal size, one character wherever possible. They do other things too... such as remove semicolons that

Minifiers also reduce variable and function names to a minimal size, one character wherever possible. They do other things too... such as remove semicolons that are not needed (not in general possible, especially if you've gotten rid of line breaks, but can be done in the last statement of a block or function, for example.) The idea is to optimize for bits sent over the wire. function a(){var b="https://google.com https://google.com"} That's why it's difficult to read minified code even if it's not obfuscated to the further extent that you sometimes see in attack payloads.