Brotli

Brotli is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Google for general-purpose use, with particular emphasis on compressing web content. It was released as open source in 2013 and later standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 7932. Brotli is designed to achieve higher compression ratios than older web compressors while maintaining fast decompression, making it well suited for HTTP content encoding.

Its compression core combines a modern LZ77-style compressor with a large built-in dictionary and entropy coding. The dictionary includes common words and phrases to improve efficiency for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript text. Brotli uses multiple code trees for literals, lengths, and distances, plus context modeling to improve encoding decisions.

Quality levels range from 0 to 11, with higher levels offering better compression at the expense of CPU usage. Decompression is fast and deterministic. In practice, Brotli often yields smaller output than DEFLATE on typical web assets, and remains widely supported for on-the-fly serving of resources.

Adoption and ecosystem: Brotli has been implemented in major web browsers and server software, and is available as libraries such as libbrotli. It is used with HTTP as the content-encoding br, and is supported by many CDNs and hosting platforms to reduce bandwidth and improve page load times.