Google has announced it will soon be adding its Brotli compression algorithm, to its Chrome web browser.
Brotli, was introduced by the Mountain View company back in September 2015, and is designed to load web pages faster than before, but only for HTTPS connections.
It is the successor to the Zopfli compression algorithm, which was released 2 years ago. Brotli, is actually being touted as a new data (content-encoding) format, in the WOFF 2.0 (Web Open Font Format), and has been reported to perform incredibly well. Brotli will also compress the data used to load webpages, and this data saving feature, though likely to be more of use for the mobile version of Chrome, it will in fact also improve the desktop web browser. Google says it will use Brotli in Chrome for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView (the in-app browser tech for Android apps).
According to Google, Brotli will be used in Mozilla Firefox and Opera as well. The latter is based on the Chromium Open Source Project, so it is likely that the new data format will be available in other browsers based on Chromium, like Vivaldi browser. Mozilla on the other hand, will implement Brotli in Firefox 44, which is scheduled to be released on January 26th.
Google Chrome will add Brotli support in the Stable Release Channel of the browser in the coming weeks, but you can test it now in the Canary Version of Chrome by enabling the following flag:
chrome://flags#enable-brotli
Hopefully this means that Chrome will use less RAM, and in turn less battery, which has been a problem with the browser for quite a few years.
The announcement page also mentions that Brotli is being considered by the Microsoft Edge developer team, and will also work in Safari (in a limited form).
via: The Verge
source: Google