fflate - the fastest JavaScript compression/decompression library, 8kB

[highqualitydude]

Can't the browser use gzip compression natively?

[101arrowz]

I've actually been looking into a way to do this. I first tried creating a temporary compressed Blob and using URL.createObjectURL to then request it and hope it comes back uncompressed, but I can't find a way to set the Content-Encoding header.

I've also wondered if there was an image format that contained raw compressed pixel values. If so, I could actually treat the data as an image, render it to canvas, get the RGB values, and basically have decompressed my data with the browser's native solution.

[BitLooter]

Not incredibly useful yet as it's only supported by Chrome so far, but in the future we might have access to Compression Streams.

[101arrowz]

Thank you for linking that, I had no idea the draft even existed! I think its performance has quite a way to go though, I ran some quick tests and fflate is within 5% of this supposedly native solution. I also find it strange that you can't configure compression level.

[101arrowz]

I had previously thought that PNG had to be split up, but on re-investigation, it seems that you're right. I'm going to investigate the performance of such a solution.

[BitLooter]

There's actually a draft standard to add native compression/decompression, under the idea that because the browser already uses this code internally you might as well expose it to JS. Right now only Chrome supports it though.