JSJuicer Web Edition

What it did

The web edition offered the packer's options as checkboxes:

• strip comments;
• strip debug lines starting with ;;;;
• safely remove unneeded whitespace and control characters;
• obfuscate symbols starting with $;
• inject a comment of your own into the output.

The ;;; convention is the clever part. Debugging lines started with three semicolons, which JavaScript reads as empty statements, so they ran normally in development and the packer could delete them for production in one pass.

What it saved

The blog post that introduced it reports two tests. Smoothbox went from 11K to 7.1K. MooTools 1.0 with every plugin went from 140K to 60K. Both still worked afterwards, as long as obfuscation stayed off; in those tests, the obfuscation option broke the code. Version 1.1, out on 13 March 2007, learned to leave Internet Explorer's conditional comments alone, and the web edition was updated the same day.

What replaced it

Minification is no longer a separate step anyone thinks about. Build tools such as esbuild, Terser and SWC shrink code as part of every production build, rename local variables safely, and write source maps so the browser's debugger can still show the original. Servers then compress the result with gzip or Brotli.

The ;;; trick has a direct descendant too. Code wrapped in a development-only check, such as if (import.meta.env.DEV), is removed from production bundles automatically, and most minifiers can drop console calls with a single setting.

Where it is now

The form itself is not rebuilt here, since it relied on the packer running on the old server. JSJuicer's own home page was hosted on googlepages.com, a Google service that no longer exists, and no current copy of the tool turned up in a 2026 search.