title: How do web browsers find a source map for a JavaScript file?
body: <p>The <a href="http://alejandroblanco.com.ar/all-you-need-to-know-about-jquery-source-maps/" rel="nofollow">following article</a> explains that in order to find the source map of a JavaScript file such as <a href="http://jquery.com/download/" rel="nofollow">jQuery</a>, the web browser looks inside the JavaScript code and looks for the line containing the <code>sourceMappingURL</code> directive embedded in a JavaScript comment. For instance, the <a href="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.0.min.js" rel="nofollow">jQuery 1.9.0 minified</a> file contains such a directive at the end of a file. However, the more recent <a href="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.1.min.js" rel="nofollow">jQuery 1.11.1 minified</a> distribution does not contain such a directive, but a <a href="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.1.min.map" rel="nofollow">jQuery 1.11.1 map file</a> is also distributed with this (final stable jQuery 1) version. So how does the web browser find the map file for the minified file.</p>
  
  <p>I guess the convention of web browsers looking for the <code>sourceMappingURL</code> directive was dropped in favor of following the naming convention of looking for a file of the same name, with <code>.js</code> replaced by <code>.min</code>. Is this what happened?</p>
  
  <p>According to the documentation for the recently released Firefox Developer Edition, such browser still seems to be looking for the <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger#Use_a_source_map" rel="nofollow">sourceMappingURL</a> directive.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>