The Apache web server doesn’t yet support stream compression using Brotli, but it’s easy to add support for static pages and assets such as CSS and Javascript files that you precompress. Browser support for Brotli is coming in Firefox 44 and in Chrome, and it provides about 15% savings versus precompressing with gzip/deflate. more …
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 …