Maxim Mironjuk
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December 30, 2025
Brotli has established itself over the past few years as the preferred compression method for HTTP responses, replacing Gzip in most production setups because it produces noticeably smaller files for text content like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Zstandard, or Zstd, is now pushing into the web space as a second modern contender, originally built for file systems and network protocols where it stands out mainly for its speed. This article compares both methods soberly on compression ratio and speed, maps out the current browser support situation for Zstd as a content encoding, and shows how both methods can run side by side on the server.