Brotli replaces Zopfli, Google’s current web compression engine responsible for reducing the size of design assets including styles and fonts delivered from websites to the browser.
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Google’s Chrome browser will soon load pages more quickly and use less data to do so, thanks to the introduction of the company’s Brotli compression algorithm.
It does that while also achieving comparable decompression speeds which, it might not surprise you to hear, “allows for better space utilization and faster page loads”.
When Brotli was first announced, Google found itself unexpectedly caught up in a gender controversy for its plans to use a ‘.bro’ file extension, which some people, quite strangely, said came across as misogynistic and unprofessional. Because Brotli is a new data format, it needs to be adopted and supported by rival browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge if it is to be successful.
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And there’s more good news as with the data being compressed – mobile users can expect to use less data when browsing away from a WiFi connection. “We show that Brotli is roughly as fast as zlib’s Deflate implementation”, said Google software engineer Zoltan Szabadka in September. On Chrome, you can easily tell if you’re using an HTTPS-enabled site by checking for the green lock symbol in the URL bar.
