Using Uglify screw-ie8 option in gulp

UglifyJS tries to be IE-proof, you can pass a flag in Uglify if you don’t care about full compliance with Internet Explorer 6-8 quirks.

You can run:

cat input.js | uglifyjs --screw-ie8 -o output.js

When if you are using gulp.js, this is how you can do that:

var minifier = require('gulp-uglify/minifier')
var uglifyjs = require('uglify-js')
var rename = require('gulp-rename')
gulp.task('uglify', function () {
  return gulp.src(['js/*.js'])
    .pipe(minifier({
      compress: {
        screw_ie8: true
      },
      mangle: {
        screw_ie8: true
      }
    }, uglifyjs))
    .pipe(rename({
      suffix: '.min'
    }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('dist'))
})

Several things to notice here:

• I use gulp-uglify/minifier so that I can specify my own version of uglify-js
• I use gulp-rename to add a suffix to the filename
• The screw_ie8 parameter needs to be passed into compress and mangle as options.

It’s really time to move on and ignore IE8.