Rollup VS browserify

Vite is a modern frontend build tool used to develop fast and super efficient web applications. It serves files instantly and ensures that changes are updated immediately after they are implemented. It makes use of Rollup for optimized builds and has support for when you want to build a Javascript library (instead of a full app).

In 2025, mastering Vite for your React projects means leveraging powerful configurations, intelligent optimizations, and a robust plugin ecosystem. By understanding Vite’s modern architecture—native ES modules (ESM) during development and optimized Rollup bundling for production—you can significantly streamline your workflow, improve developer experience, and deliver fast, performant applications at scale.

6. Production-Ready Code Vite uses Rollup for production builds, which optimizes the code by bundling it efficiently, performing tree shaking, and minifying JavaScript. This results in smaller, optimized production builds that are ready for deployment.

Meanwhile, esbulid (developed in Go language, as introduced earlier) and rollup can also be used separately as packaging tools, and many third-party JS plugins are packaged using rollup.

npm packages dramatically sped up the productivity of developers by being able to leverage other developers' work. However, it had a major disadvantage: cjs was not compatible with web browsers. To solve this problem, the concept of bundlers was born. browserify was the first bundler which essentially worked by traversing an entry point and "bundling" all the require()-ed code into a single .js file compatible with web browsers. As time went on, other bundlers with additional features and differentiators were introduced. Most notably webpack, parcel, rollup, esbuild and vite (in chronological order).

Rollup is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. Rollup Documentation

The JS SDK now lets you opt out of specific modules you don't need and optimize the final bundle size. You can do that by using either of two popular JavaScript build tools: Rollup or Webpack.

Rollup.js is a JavaScript module bundler that compiles small pieces of code into larger, more complex applications. It is particularly well-suited for bundling ES6 modules and is known for its efficient tree-shaking capabilities, which eliminate unused code from the final bundle, resulting in smaller file sizes.

Rollup bundles runtime artifacts.

This is also a valid approach, but what we really want is to be able to write our code in TypeScript and have it transpile into the JavaScript we need. Enter Rollup.

npm packages dramatically sped up the productivity of developers by being able to leverage other developers' work. However, it had a major disadvantage: cjs was not compatible with web browsers. To solve this problem, the concept of bundlers was born. browserify was the first bundler which essentially worked by traversing an entry point and "bundling" all the require()-ed code into a single .js file compatible with web browsers. As time went on, other bundlers with additional features and differentiators were introduced. Most notably webpack, parcel, rollup, esbuild and vite (in chronological order).

Browserify to use node packages in the browser.

Browserify is a widely used JavaScript bundler with over 2 million NPM weekly downloads. In addition to Node.js support, allowing developers to use require() statements in the browser is one of its highlighted features.

This began to change when NPM came in and running npm install became a quick and easy way to install dependencies. Browserify became the first JavaScript bundler. As its documentation says -

Using Npm Module with Browserify

https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify probably a little old school, but browserify is probably good enough.

One problem was to run jsDOM as UMD module. But luckly I was able to use browserify to compile jsDOM into UMD.

Browserify