Speed was always important to Google. Heck it’s important to mostly everyone who uses the Internet. Everyone wants their favorite website to load quickly – and compression plays a big role in this. We minify our CSS/JS files; we use GZIP compression, and we try to compress all of our image files to help ensure that our websites load as fast as possible. As such Google has introduced a brand new open source compression algorithm called Brotli.
In our study ‘Comparison of Brotli, Deflate, Zopfli, LZMA, LZHAM and Bzip2 Compression Algorithms’ we show that Brotli is roughly as fast as zlib’s Deflate implementation. At the same time, it compresses slightly more densely than LZMA and bzip2 on the Canterbury corpus.
As it sits right now Brotli isn’t supported in any browser – yet. If it’s as good as it claims to be I have no doubt that this new compression format will shortly be integrated into tons of different platforms. You can check out the algorithm and fork it over here on Github.