Is JS obfuscation the same as JS encryption?

Is JS obfuscation the same as JS encryption?

In most cases, JS obfuscation and JS encryption refer to the same thing.

Conventionally, non-English-speaking countries refer to it as JS encryption, while English-speaking countries call it obfuscation. They are actually the same. Both refer to protecting JS code, such as making variable names meaningless, encrypting strings, scrambling execution flows, and so on. The purpose is to make JS code unreadable and difficult to understand, thus preventing the code written by oneself from being used or analyzed by others.

JS obfuscation and JS encryption have become a mature industry, with many popular tools, often in the form of SaaS online websites. For example, js-obfuscator, jshaman, jsjiami.online, are all professional JS obfuscation and encryption tools.

However, in JS programming, there is another type of encryption, referring to encryption algorithms, such as MD5 encryption and Base64 encoding. But they are generally referred to directly as encryption algorithms, rather than JS obfuscation or JS encryption.