Google Publishes Zopfli, an Open-Source Compression Library

alphadogg writes "Google is open-sourcing a new general purpose data compression library called Zopfli that can be used to speed up Web downloads. The Zopfli Compression Algorithm, which got its name from a Swiss bread recipe, is an implementation of the Deflate compression algorithm that creates a smaller output size (PDF) compared to previous techniques, wrote Lode Vandevenne, a software engineer with Google's Compression Team, on the Google Open Source Blog on Thursday. 'The smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization, faster data transmission, and lower Web page load latencies. Furthermore, the smaller compressed size has additional benefits in mobile use, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use,' Vandevenne wrote. The more exhaustive compression techniques achieve higher data density, but also make the compression a lot slower. This does not affect the decompression speed though, Vandenne wrote."

Comments

Redundant and not even good...

[gweihir]

There is zero need for this. There are a number of free compressors available that already cover the spectrum well, for example lzop, gzip, bzip2, xz (in order of better compression and more resource consumption). The stated 3-8% better compression in relation to zlib is not even worth considering using this. Also, anything new will have bugs and unexpected problems.

This is over-hyped and basically a complete non-event.