Web Development Intermediate

What is Brotli Compression?

A modern compression algorithm developed by Google that achieves better compression ratios than Gzip for web content delivery.

Brotli (br) compresses web assets 15-25% better than Gzip at comparable speed. It uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman coding, and a built-in dictionary of common web content patterns (HTML tags, CSS properties, JavaScript keywords). Most modern browsers support Brotli via the Accept-Encoding: br header. Web servers like Nginx (ngx_brotli module), Apache (mod_brotli), and CDNs (Cloudflare, Fastly) support Brotli compression. Brotli levels 1-4 are suitable for dynamic compression, while levels 5-11 are for static pre-compression. The built-in dictionary gives Brotli a significant advantage for small files where Gzip struggles to find patterns.

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