The simplest and biggest space saver that minification does is remove excess whitespace and newlines. Compression schemes do the exact same thing, as well as co

The simplest and biggest space saver that minification does is remove excess whitespace and newlines. Compression schemes do the exact same thing, as well as compress all the other characters used in the source. Yes, the browser will have to decompress and the whitespaces will be included in the parsing step for the javascript engine, but at this point we're deep in the weeds. The biggest driver of speed for web pages is the network.