What's the recommended way to drop Polymer's source maps in a deployed app?

Question

When deploying a Polymer app to production, what's the recommended way to avoid requests for Polymer's source map files? The files platform.js.map and polymer.js.map weigh in at ~800K. Even if those downloads are deferred, surely there is some user impact (e.g., on mobile devices) simply spending bandwidth getting those files, isn't there?

Currently, my deployment process simply skips over the .map files, but when looking at the production site, I still see the browser trying to find them. Those requests fail with a 404, since the files aren't deployed. In theory the 404s shouldn't slow anything down, but it's still distracting to see 404s show up. It makes it look like there's a problem when in fact there isn't.

I could write a Grunt task to strip off the //# sourceMappingURL line from the associated .js files, but I was wondering if anyone has experimented with other means by which to drop the source maps. Or have people found that there is literally no impact on user experience when including those files?

Answer 1

I would consider it a browser bug if any browser loaded source maps when the user isn't using debug tools on the site in question. Are you noticing a significant number of requests to your source maps in your logs?

Answer 2

If you're using Google Chrome Devtools and want the source maps to be ignored, you can go to settings and uncheck the corresponding "Enable Javascript source maps" check box.