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It's not even necessary for compression -- gzip is decent and transparent.

It's not done for compression, it's about tree-shaking and bundling dependencies.

And failing in weird abd obscure ways if your browser is slightly outside the mainstream.

Like if it's SeaMonkey.

I highly doubt that that has anything to do with minification/tree shaking. My guess would be JavaScript feature and API support.

You mean "not chrome?"