It wasn't a "fragile edge case", it worked just fine with no ambiguity in every javascript implementation. The problem is that jsmin is a naive pile of textual

It wasn't a "fragile edge case", it worked just fine with no ambiguity in every javascript implementation. The problem is that jsmin is a naive pile of textual replacements (though not quite as abysmal as John Gruber's markdown.pl) instead of being a javascript implementation — something that actually parses javascript into an AST and compiles it to minified javascript. He left out cases for several unary operators so it broke perfectly valid code. After bitching at them he came to his senses and fixed it: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSMin/commit/5ca277ea452beae1c25db3bc0ef5c81309a3daf4 https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSMin/commit/5ca277ea452... Unless for some reason you need your minifier to be trivial enough to be portable with no dependencies, you should really be using something along the lines of google's Closure Compiler, which produces far better output and even has stuff like tests!