Strict DI Mode basically throws errors when, at run time, it is found a piece of code that is not compliant to minification; but note that the code may be right and without logical-syntactical errors.

Citing the documentation:

if this attribute is present on the app element, the injector will be created in strict-di mode. This means that the application will fail to invoke functions which do not use explicit function annotation (and are thus unsuitable for minification), as described in the Dependency Injection guide, and useful debugging info will assist in tracking down the root of these bugs.

For example this code triggers an error because ($scope, $http, $filter) are not explicitly injected using $inject or giving to the .controller(A,B) method an array as second field.

angular.module(myApp, [])

// BadController cannot be invoked, because

// the dependencies to be injected are not

// explicitly listed.

.controller(BadController, function($scope, $http, $filter) {

  // ...

});

Right snippet:

angular.module(myApp, [])

  .controller(GoodController1, GoodController1);



GoodController1.$inject = [$scope, $http, $filter];



function GoodController1($scope, $http, $filter){}

or:

angular.module(myApp, [])

  .controller(GoodController1, 

              [$scope, $http, $filter, function ($scope, $http, $filter){

     //...

}]);

In order to answer at your question there is no significant performance improvement by using it. It only grant to you the minifiability error safeness. This because minification changes variables names breaking your code when for example you use $scope without explicit annotation.