This is a bit strange: this seems to come from Google, who already invented another general-purpose compression scheme called Snappy[1], which is also usable in

This is a bit strange: this seems to come from Google, who already invented another general-purpose compression scheme called Snappy[1], which is also usable in streaming. TFA mentions gzip and deflate but not Snappy. Brotli seems to aim for better compression whereas Snappy aims for more speed, but they're both based on LZ77. Brotli has something else in common with Snappy: a lack of a specified framing mechanism. When Snappy first came out it did not have one, so if you wanted to write Snappy-compressed data to a file, you might invent your own header to frame the compressed data. They later added this to Snappy, but by then it was too late: implementations had already come up with their own, mutually-incompatible framing. The same mistake seems to be being made again with Brotli. [1] https://code.google.com/p/snappy/ https://code.google.com/p/snappy/