InformAction Forums

A jar inside the XPI still works, but is no longer necessary

Looking at and tweaking the source for troubleshooting purposes would be easier without it.

I wonder if this would increase the file size, since AFAIK in the ZIP format each file is compressed for itself.

noscript.jar is not compressed

Exactly, because otherwise you would try to compress it twice. But what it does is that it merges many files into one and therefore the size decrease of the compressed jar file might be higher than what you would get if you compressed each file separately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_compression

dhouwn wrote: the size decrease of the compressed jar file might be higher than what you would get if you compressed each file separately

Not "might", but "does".
The zero-compression jar has been kept so far just to reduce the XPI size.
However it has already gone away in NoScript 3 (which is smaller anyway because removes tons of legacy/compatibility code).