Topic: Hypertext – Ctrl blog

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?

Why Firefox for Android logs you out of everything all the time

2021-02-02T14:58:00Z

I’ve been increasingly frustrated with Firefox for Android, my preferred mobile web browser. I’ve repeatedly had to re-login to some websites and had various problems with cookies since last year’s release of the new Firefox codenamed “Daylight.” Websites forget me between each visit and I get the “new visitor” experience every time. I finally worked out what’s going wrong.

Chrome to remove HTTP/2 Push

2020-11-30T22:43:00Z

Chromium developers have announced that they plan to remove support for HTTP/2 server push from the market-leading browser engine. Server push lets web servers preemptively send clients resources it expects them to request later. The technique can reduce the number of network round-trips required before the client has all the resources it needs to display a page. The announcement cited high implementation complexity, low adoption among websites, and questionable performance gains as the reason for the removal.

Promote your Onion site with the Onion-Location HTTP header

2020-06-23T15:45:00Z

The Tor Browser anonymizes web browsing using multi-hop network routing featuring layered encryption (the “Onion network”). You can picture it like that trope in action movies where they’re tracing a network intrusion back through multiple server locations scattered all over a world map. (Except that the reverse tracing isn’t a thing and the Onion network’s encryption prevents any meaningful interception.)

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.