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google
brotli
TypeScript2015–2026
google / brotli

brotli

Brotli compression format

35Distinct people
39Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
15.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Brotli compression format

GitHub

Where it is used

  • Chromium — Chromium ships this library to decode WOFF 2.0 fonts and "Content-Encoding: br" responses. Source

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:28:18 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year39 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-05-26 11:50:27 UTC to 2026-10-26 00:43:08 UTC.

02462015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 3 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC532
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Introduction Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. It is similar in speed with deflate but offers more dense compression. The specification of the Brotli Compressed Data Format is defined in RFC 7932. Brotli is open-sourced under the MIT License, see the LICENSE file. Please note: brotli is a "stream" format; it does not contain meta-information, like checksums or uncompressed data length. It is possible to modify "raw" ranges of the compressed stream and the decoder will not notice that. Installation In most Linux distributions, installing brotli is just a matter of using the package management system. For example in Debian-based distributions: apt install brotli will install brotli. On MacOS, you can use Homebrew: brew install brotli. Of course you can also build brotli from sources. Build instructions Vcpkg You can download and install brotli using the vcpkg dependency manager: git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git cd vcpkg ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh ./vcpkg integrate install ./vcpkg install brotli The brotli port in vcpkg is kept up to date by Microsoft team members and community contributors. If the version is out of date, please create an issue or pull request on the vcpkg repository. Bazel See Bazel CMake The basic commands to build and install brotli are: $ mkdir out && cd out $ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./installed .. $ cmake --build . --config Release --target install You can use other CMake configuration. Python To install the latest release of the Python module, run the following: $ pip install brotli To install the tip-of-the-tree version, run: $ pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/google/brotli See the Python readme for more details on installing from source, development, and testing. Contributing We glad to answer/library related questions in brotli mailing list. Regular issues / feature requests should be reported in issue tracker. For reporting vulnerability please read SECURITY. For contributing changes please read CONTRIBUTING. Benchmarks Squash Compression Benchmark / Unstable Squash Compression Benchmark Large Text Compression Benchmark Lzturbo Benchmark Related projects Disclaimer: Brotli authors take no responsibility for the third party projects mentioned in this section. Independent decoder implementation by Mark Adler, based entirely on format specification. JavaScript port of brotli decoder. Could be used directly via npm install brotli Hand ported decoder / encoder in haxe by Dominik Homberger. Output source code: JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java and C# 7Zip plugin Dart compression framework with fast FFI-based Brotli implementation with ready-to-use prebuilt binaries for Win/Linux/Mac
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

5 sources
What is the compression time for brotli to achieve compression ratios comparable to LZMA on these types of data sets: https://github.com/google/brotli/issues/165 I understand that brotli is incredibly slow as compared to LZMA when using these high ratio settings (q11, w24), so slow as to be impractical in production even in a write-once, read-many scenario if you have any non-trivial amount of data being regularly produced. I do not want to have a farm of machines just to handle the brotli compression load of our data sets just because it is 10x slower than LZMA.
In Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard

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