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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.
Anytime anyone touts their new lossless compression algorithm, I immediately ask "Yeah but does it beat my 7-Zip profile?".
The answer is either "no" or "yes but only in very specific cases" (and in those cases I could write a filter for 7-Zip to compress those specific cases with a better algorithm) or "yes, it is WinRAR".
7-Zip recently added ( http://www.7-zip.org/history.t... ) support for decompressing the new RAR format, so go ahead and compare them yourself.
They're pretty much neck and neck. I believe WinRAR's archives offer better resilience to damage, as well.