14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced that Edge browser, which is the new default in Windows 10, would support Brotli as an HTTP content encoding method starting with the upcoming Creators Update due in early 2017.
Brotli, which is an open-source compression algorithm maintained by Google, should help Microsoft offer faster page loading times in Edge browser, while at the same time reducing power and data usage.
“When used as an HTTP content-encoding method, Brotli achieves up to 20% better compression ratios with similar compression and decompression speeds (PDF). This ultimately results in substantially reduced page weight for users, improving load times without substantially impacting client-side CPU costs. As compared to existing algorithms, like Deflate, Brotli compression is more efficient in terms of file size and CPU time,” Microsoft explains.
Insiders can already try it out
Brotli arrives in Microsoft Edge starting with version 15.14986, and insiders are obviously the first ones to be able to give it a try. Stable Windows 10 builds, however, will get it with the Creators Update in the spring.
At this point, Microsoft says that Brotli works on HTTPS and HTTP connections, but in the future, the new compression algorithm will only be available for HTTPS. There is also a known bug in the existing implementations, and the F12 Developer Tools feature does not correctly show the encoding response header.
Microsoft is pushing hard for Edge browser to become a better alternative to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and all these improvements certainly help.
Even though most of these updates aren’t necessarily visible to users, Microsoft is working mostly on tweaks under the hood, which should lead to faster browsing and better security.
The Windows 10 Creators Update is projected to launch in the first months of 2017, and according to previous reports, it could be version 1703, which means that the target month for the release is March.