The first thing I thought was what a stupid name. Sheesh.
People that do compression really need to engage a marketing guy before naming things.
I would expect Google to know a good piece of software when they see one,
Really? Google thought pre-fetch was a good idea back when mobile was slow and often iffy,They also didn't consider the impact on webmaster stats loading pages nobody actually saw. Then they got Firefox to drink the same asinine punch.
They often don't look at the worse case real world scenarios, only their high speed gigabit networks.
I'd have to see it to really analyze it, obviously,but there's a real speed vs. perceived speed.
Unless this is a streaming compression algo, it's not worth squat to big dynamic sites IMO because if you need the whole page to compress it, like gzip, it actually appears to SLOW DOWN the total user experience. With no compression the visitor watches the page load as the buffers fill and flush. With compression they wait, and wait, until the page fully completes and then it's compressed and BANG! you get a page.
In reality the complete time to generate, compress and deliver the page may truly be faster even with gzip on big fat dynamic sites, but it doesn't appear that way to the end user.
Sure, maybe they do shave size off the file, then save time delivering, while the user waits and waits
For a static site or some bare bones blogs it would probably scream.
For sites like Amazon, eBay, WebmasterWorld, it would probably suck.
However, using very clever tricks such a thin format page that compress down, loads fast, then loads the real content via iframes so the visitor at least sees the page above the fold quickly while the rest trickles in, that could possibly work.
Guess it depends on how you approach the overall architecture what the perceived speed would really be.
Funny though that now the world is switching to 4G they finally find something that might help lighten the load on 3G. Day late and a dollar short.
What cracks me up is how they talk about saving a few bytes on a few web pages and the savings in battery power and money on the data plan, when that same phone is probably streaming videos, music and every other thing making the savings off a few web pages pathetically insignificant.
However, as a guy that used to dabble in sorting and compression I'm sure it will be interesting to see the code at a minimum.
Google Releases Brotli: Open Source Compression Algorithm
