Ok, guess I'll summarize:
Don't use compressed or encoded JS files.
Longer clarification:
I'm referring to actual *.js files, not what's directly in a web page. Xepher is right, it conserves bandwidth... but at the cost of performance. At least that's been our recent discovery with jQuery and other larger javascript frameworks or API's. Thanks to the wonderful world of broadband making things dead cheap in the bandwidth category, there's not much need to optimize things as much as there used to be anyhow. What I'm referring to is more along the lines of javascript files that are compressed and need to initialize/decompress/etc... each and every time you load a new page.
The difference we saw was literally noticeable visually. As in we could immediately tell the speed differences.
See, rather than just downloading a slightly larger file, caching it, and then just using it on page loads, it was downloading a smaller, compressed file, caching that, and then each and every page load it'd need to decompress it first, then run it. Though it's more noticeable when you're pulling things via an Ajax API that runs after the page is finished loading.
Don't use compressed or encoded JS files.
Longer clarification:
I'm referring to actual *.js files, not what's directly in a web page. Xepher is right, it conserves bandwidth... but at the cost of performance. At least that's been our recent discovery with jQuery and other larger javascript frameworks or API's. Thanks to the wonderful world of broadband making things dead cheap in the bandwidth category, there's not much need to optimize things as much as there used to be anyhow. What I'm referring to is more along the lines of javascript files that are compressed and need to initialize/decompress/etc... each and every time you load a new page.
The difference we saw was literally noticeable visually. As in we could immediately tell the speed differences.
See, rather than just downloading a slightly larger file, caching it, and then just using it on page loads, it was downloading a smaller, compressed file, caching that, and then each and every page load it'd need to decompress it first, then run it. Though it's more noticeable when you're pulling things via an Ajax API that runs after the page is finished loading.