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  1. Stackups
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  5. Browserify vs Webpack

Browserify vs Webpack

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Browserify
Browserify
Stacks2.2K
Followers414
Votes261
Webpack
Webpack
Stacks45.0K
Followers28.1K
Votes752
GitHub Stars65.7K
Forks9.2K

Browserify vs Webpack: What are the differences?

## Key Differences Between Browserify and Webpack

<Write Introduction here>

1. **Bundle Configuration**: Browserify relies on an external configuration file to define the bundle settings, whereas Webpack allows bundling configurations to be defined directly within the project's configuration file.
2. **Code Splitting**: Webpack has built-in support for code splitting, allowing you to split your code into multiple bundles that can be loaded on demand. Browserify lacks this feature, requiring additional tools or configurations to achieve code splitting.
3. **Loaders and Plugins**: Webpack offers a more extensive range of loaders and plugins for processing various file types, while Browserify has a more limited set of options for transforming files during the bundling process.
4. **Performance Optimization**: Webpack provides a more sophisticated approach to performance optimization through features like tree shaking and module concatenation. Browserify, on the other hand, may require manual optimizations or additional tools to achieve similar results.
5. **Hot Module Replacement**: Webpack natively supports hot module replacement, allowing modules to be updated without a full page refresh during development. Browserify requires additional setup and configuration to enable similar functionality.
6. **Community and Ecosystem**: Webpack enjoys a larger and more active community, resulting in more comprehensive documentation, support, and a wider selection of plugins and tools compared to Browserify.

## Summary
In Summary, Webpack offers more advanced features, better performance optimization, and a larger community support compared to Browserify.

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Advice on Browserify, Webpack

Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

  • Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
  • Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
  • Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.
301k views301k
Comments
Abigail
Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

224k views224k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Browserify
Browserify
Webpack
Webpack

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Use a node-style require() to organize your browser code and load modules installed by npm.;browserify will recursively analyze all the require() calls in your app in order to build a bundle you can serve up to the browser in a single script tag.
Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined); Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time); Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size; Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc; Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
65.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
9.2K
Stacks
2.2K
Stacks
45.0K
Followers
414
Followers
28.1K
Votes
261
Votes
752
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 75
    Node style browser code
  • 52
    Load modules installed by npm
  • 45
    Works great with gulp.js
  • 38
    NPM modules in the brower
  • 34
    Open source
Pros
  • 309
    Most powerful bundler
  • 182
    Built-in dev server with livereload
  • 142
    Can handle all types of assets
  • 87
    Easy configuration
  • 22
    Laravel-mix
Cons
  • 15
    Hard to configure
  • 5
    No clear direction
  • 2
    Spaghetti-Code out of the box
  • 2
    SystemJS integration is quite lackluster
  • 2
    Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers
Integrations
No integrations available
JavaScript
JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Browserify, Webpack?

gulp

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

npm

npm

npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.

Grunt

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

RequireJS

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Yarn

Yarn

Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

Brunch

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Component

Component

Component's philosophy is the UNIX philosophy of the web - to create a platform for small, reusable components that consist of JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc. With its well-defined specs, using Component means not worrying about most frontend problems such as package management, publishing components to a registry, or creating a custom build process for every single app.

Parcel

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

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