Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from javascript source code without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute. Removing those characters and compacting files can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time. This may include combining scripts into a single file in order to decrease the number of HTTP requests.