The obvious next question is "can't you achieve the same thing with gzip": time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.js > /dev/null 236k bytes

The obvious next question is "can't you achieve the same thing with gzip": time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.js > /dev/null 236k bytes real 0m0.432s time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js > /dev/null 83612 bytes real 0m0.323s time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.js --compressed > /dev/null 87509 bytes real 0m0.273s time curl http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.3.min.js --compressed > /dev/null 34066 bytes real 0m0.215s I think that people should be more skeptical of the complexity introduced by things like minification, but the advantages are pretty clear, even with compression.