When comparing Browserify vs Curl.js, the Slant community recommends Browserify for most people. In the question“What are the best RequireJS alternatives?” Browserify is ranked 1st while Curl.js is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Browserify is:
Using browserify opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.
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Pros
Pro Tap into npm's huge module ecosystem
Using browserify opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.
Pro Simple to use dependency management
To require a file, just use the require() function.
var foo = require('./foo.js');
These files may have dependencies of their own. Browserify will build a dependency graph and bundle it into a single file that you just have to put in a script tag.
<html>
<body>
<script src="bundle.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
Pro Share the same modules client-side and server-side
Because browserify allows you to use the same require() function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.
Pro Provides browser-friendly shims of Node modules
Browserify provides browser-friendly shims of Node modules, that allow for things like Node event systems, path parsing, URL parsing.
Pro deAMDify & debowerify allow using modules written for other systems
Browserify includes transforms such as deAMDify, that allow you to use modules written in the AMD module format, and debowerify, that allows you to use modules intended to be managed by Bower package manager.
Pro CJS module format
Pro Friendly plugin interface
Writing plugins is relatively easy and straight forward as each file, you can run a function that gives a file name and path, based on that you can decide if you want to do something like parse, transform, modify etc the file or skip it.
Pro Size ~4KB (gzipped)
Pro Async loading on demand
Async loading on demand including loadings from cdns. For example it is easy to load jquery from cdn as a module. The same thing is not that easy to achieve in Webpack
Pro Provides legacy loader
Legacy loader supports loading of plain js files and exporting globals or even expressions.
Pro AMD & CJS module support
Supports both AMD and CommonJS modules.
Cons
Con Requires NodeJS environment just to get in the door
Browserify does nothing client-side. It's only a server-side builder. If you want to load files from other domains, look at RequireJS. If you want to break your code up into multiple modules, look at RequireJS or Webpack.
Con Requires a lot of magic for setup
Digging for high amount of modules
Con Development has stopped
The maintainers have announced that all development for CurlJS has stopped, at least for the foreseeable future.