Innovation in Lossless Compression: Apple’s LZFSE, Google’s Brotli and Yann Collet’s Zstandard
With Google’s recent open-sourcing of Brotli following on the heels of Apple’s announcement of LZFSE, it’s an exciting time in the lossless compression world, as new compression schemes tuned for specific use cases now appear to offer substantial enough benefits to challenge the venerable ZIP/Deflate as the Internet’s transport compression algorithm of choice.
Of course, Deflate and its most widespread implementation, zlib, aren’t dead yet, not by a long shot. But what these new LZ77 algorithms offer is significant enough performance gains to justify widespread implementation, and adoption by the W3C. And they have the backing of companies such as Google and Apple, which means they’ll ship on tens of millions of devices and browser installs. more …