The dudes at dojo developed a great tool called shrinksafe that can safely optimize your JavaScript. It removes the whitespace and shortens local variable names, but leaves the function names alone.

They offer a downloadable installation – but when you live on the web, who has time to install apps?

Until recently, they also hosted an online interface. However, when I tried to find last week all the links to it seemed to 404. I even sent an email to the developers…

Today, I looked again and found a little more info. The tool has been re-enabled. The page interface page is ugly, but seems to work fine.

Took our JS library from 18.5 down to 10.6k!

P.S.
I know that 10.6 is still quite a bit – the library is overdue for a rewrite using a standard toolkit.