The hit show Silicon Valley revolves around the creation of a powerful compression algorithm that can make multimedia files much smaller, potentially speeding up both streaming video and file downloads online. On the show, the inner workings of the code are a secret coveted by fictional startup Pied Piper's competitors. But in real life, Google is giving away its new compression technology for free.
Google has released the source code for a new compression algorithm called Brotli, which the company hopes will help speed up web browsing by shrinking images, web fonts, and other content.
"We hope that this format will be supported by major browsers in the near future," Google engineer Zoltan Szabadka wrote in a blog post, "as the smaller compressed size would give additional benefits to mobile users, such as lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use."
The new algorithm is a successor to Google's Zopfli compression algorithm, which the company published two years ago. According to a paper released by the Google, the new algorithm enables both faster compression and smaller file sizes than Zopfli. (Google didn't note what the Brotli's Weissman Score is.)
