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Firefox 126.0 Release Notes (www.mozilla.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Can someone explain,

Firefox now supports Content-encoding: zstd (zstandard compression). This is an alternative to broti and gzip compression for web content, and can provide higher compression levels for the same CPU used, or conversely lower server CPU use to get the same compression. This is heavily used on sites such as Facebook.

what it means for me the user and what it means for the people who host content?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Faster load times and/or less bandwidth. zstd is a newish compression algorithm that has being chosen in a lot of use cases because it can be turned to be faster with the same compression rate or better compression with the same processing time. For the content host it saves bandwidth or CPU time with compression.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I should have asked more specifically asking how are they using zstd. I already understand that its a compression algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Firefox can now advertise that it can support zstd as a compression algorithm to web servers, which means websites can use it for Firefox users.

The impact for the user is pretty limited, it basically just means some sites might load slightly faster, but it's probably not going to be noticeable. The bigger impact is on website hosting.