For compatibility and speed, gzip is a winner. It's fast and it's everywhere (plus it compresses text well enough that it makes sense to use in place of non-co

For compatibility and speed, gzip is a winner. It's fast and it's everywhere (plus it compresses text well enough that it makes sense to use in place of non-compressed files). For strong compression, there are better options than bzip2. In a sense, bzip2 is "worse of both worlds".