Google Chrome is receiving a significant speed boost thanks to a new compression algorithm called Brotli which the tech giant says is up to 26 percent faster than its existing compression engine ‘Zopfli’ – quite an impressive jump in performance.
Brotli is a “whole new data format” which is capable of outperforming gzip for typical web assets (css, html, js) by 17-25%.
Google Web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik posted the following message on Google+ on Tuesday:
“Good news, Brotli compression is coming to a Chrome browser near you! Intent to ship, with LGTMs”
The tech giant first unveiled Brotli last September.
Google said the following about its new compression algorithm in a blog post:
“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.
“The higher data density is achieved by a 2nd order context modeling, re-use of entropy codes, larger memory window of past data and joint distribution codes. Just like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after Swiss bakery products. Brötli means ‘small bread’ in Swiss German.”
The smaller compressed size provided by the new compression algorithm ‘Brotli’ allows for better space utilization and faster page loads.