Topic: Compression – Ctrl blog

Bitrot resistance of next-generation image formats

2021-11-26T12:09:00Z

I’ve compared two next-generation image formats, AVIF and JPEG XL (JXL), to see which best handles a random single corrupted bit. A meaningless exercise? Possibly. But half a picture of your beloved grandma is better than no picture at all.

Does the web still need HTTP Deflate?

2021-06-28T07:38:00Z

Compressing webpages to make them smaller is crucial to ensure fast webpage load times. Gzip and Brotli are the web’s two most used compression formats. A third contender, HTTP Deflate, has been around as long as Gzip, but it never caught on. Do you still need to support it on your websites and apps? or is it time to retire HTTP Deflate from the web platform?

Comparing file sizes of lossless WebP vs FLIF vs PNG

2020-07-14T02:26:00Z

Last weekend, I compared two lossy image formats: AVIF and WebP. Today, I’m comparing the file size reduction of two lossless formats — FLIF and lossless WebP — compared to heavily optimized PNG images.

Optimize your metadata for better compression

2019-10-15T06:02:00Z

HTML Tidy can clean-up HTML documents by normalizing them, stripping comments, sorting element attributes alphabetically, and outputting consistent pretty-printed markup. The result is an HTML document with less unique data with more consistent and repeating patterns. This yields improved Gzip/DEFLATE compression-rates compared to a less neatly organized documents.

Compressed favicons are 70% smaller but 75% are served uncompressed

2019-06-12T05:23:00Z

Conventional wisdom for performance optimization says that you should only enable HTTP content negotiated compression for plain text data formats and leave it off for binary data formats. Many binary image formats natively support compression so there would be little gained from compression them again. However, there are a number of exceptions to this rule and one of them is the ubiquitous favicon.ico file.