Google Launches Brotli, a New Open Source Compression Algorithm For the Web

Mark Wilson writes: As websites and online services become ever more demanding, the need for compression increases exponentially. Fans of Silicon Valley will be aware of the Pied Piper compression algorithm, and now Google has a more efficient one of its own. Brotli is open source and is an entirely new data format that offers 20-26 percent greater compression than Zopfli, another compression algorithm from Google. Just like Zopfli, Brotli has been designed with the internet in mind, with the simple aim of making web pages load faster. It is a "lossless compressed data format that compresses data using a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding, with efficiency comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods". Compression is better than LZMA and bzip2, and Google says that Brotli is "roughly as fast" as zlib's Deflate implementation.

Comments

7zip

[Anonymous Coward]

is still more efficient.

For the web only, not much more

[NotInHere]

From the paper:

Unlike other algorithms compared here, brotli includes a static dictionary. It contains 13’504
words or syllables of English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Russian and Arabic, as well as common
phrases used in machine readable languages, particularly HTML and JavaScript.

This means that brotli isn't a general purpose algorithm, but only built for the web, not more. I guess that future versions of the algorithm will include customized support for other, smaller languages, whose compression databases are only downloaded if you open a web page in that language.

Re:name and shame

[doconnor]

Google announced a while ago that they would take into account page load speed in search ranking.