Microsoft Edge will start supporting Brotli as an HTTP content-encoding method, starting with EdgeHTML 15.149861. This new version is expected to be released in early 2017 with Windows 10 Creator’s Update, to stable builds . However, you can preview it now through the Windows Insider Program. This release will make Brotli broadly interoperable across multiple browsers, with support to the latest versions of Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Chrome.
Brotli is a compression format defined in RFC 7932, and it had earlier been available as part of the WOFF2 font format.
Rob Trace, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge, in the
official blog, states,
“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.”
In this latest release, Microsoft Edge supports Brotli on HTTPS and HTTP connections. In the upcoming release, the company states that they will go on to update this behavior to only advertise Brotli support on HTTPS connections. Microsoft also says that just like Chrome, the company will decode the Brotli content on HTTP connections.
It is important to note that in this current preview release, there is a known issue which results in the F12 Developer Tools incorrectly not showing the "accept encoding response" header. This has been tracked as issue 9771399 on
issues.microsoftedge.com.
With such updates added to the Creator's Update, we hope to see a great and better makeover of Windows 10 in 2017. Well! Let's hope for the best.