Brotli compression support?

[mboelen]

• I have read this document: https://miniflux.app/opinionated.html#feature-request

With Brotli support (introduced in 2013) being more common now in browsers, is this something you would consider adding to Miniflux?

Background:

In our logs we noticed that Miniflux already uses compression (Gzip). The file might be further reduced when using Brotli. Example from our log below:

2024-04-13T13:30:02+00:00 200 1.2.3.4 "GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1" 17183 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.75 Safari/537.36" TLSv1.3/TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 0.000 .
2024-04-13T13:31:22+00:00 200 2.3.4.5 "GET /feed/ HTTP/2.0" 20621 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Miniflux/2.1.2; +https://miniflux.app)" TLSv1.3/TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 0.000 .

Thanks for your consideration.

[fguillot]

Brotli could be added. However, a third-party library is required because it's not part of the Go standard library. It's unfortunate that the Go team rejected the proposal in this issue.

Zstandard (zstd) could also be considered now that Chrome ships it since version 123. Apparently, it's better than Brotli and might become more popular.

[mboelen]

What a shame that they rejected it, as it is already (besides Gzip) the second "default" option available in browsers. So each web server that implements it, will have a benefit from it (and the client as well).

Zstd is definitely a good addition as well, although the implementation rates will be much lower at thismoment. For example, Brotli is typically easier to install as there are packages available to add the module to something like nginx.

If the implementation time is limited, adding both will be a safe bet. In the short time it will then benefit from Brotli, at the long(er) time period zstd.

[mboelen]

That's awesome @fguillot !

I made a blog post to share these improvements and updated it. 👍

[jvoisin]

golang/go#62513 (comment) zstandard will likely land in go's stdlib \o/