Google's Brotli compression squashes web data by 26 percent

Google has been making strides to save on web page data with numerous compression techniques over the years, enabling us all to open up our favourite websites that little bit faster. The tech giant is preparing to release a new compression algorithm for Chrome and other browsers called “Brotli”, which is said to be between 20 and 26 percent more efficient than the existing Zopfli algorithm.

Brotli works based on an entirely new data format, which allows Google to achieve its big improvements to the compression ratio while still maintaining roughly the same speeds as its existing implementation. You can read more about the technical details over at Google’s blog, but basically this smaller compression size allows for better space utilization and faster page loading times, which is what we really care about. For us mobile users, this also means that web pages will consume slightly less data than before, saving on our precious data limits.

We don’t have an exact date for when Google will be merging its new compression algorithm into its main Chrome branch, but the code is apparently ready to ship, so it could appear as soon as the next browser version. The technology is also said to be heading to other “major browsers” in the near future.