Bug 154859 – Add support for format brotli for HTTP compression

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: MOVED
• Component: WebCore Misc.

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I'm opening this for the record, although that will probably need to be discussed on the webkit-dev mailing list. For GTK, we can rely on the work done in bug 152616 to bundle the brotli library.

Here are corresponding references for Gecko and Blink:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/44#HTTP
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/JufzX024oy0/WEOGbN43AwAJ

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/24925533>

Can we expect brotli support in Webkit/Safari anytime soon? What's the plan?
MS Edge will have brotli support in upcoming Edge 15 - resulting in Webkit as the only browser left missing it. See http://caniuse.com/#feat=brotli

[Eugene Klyuchnikov]

That might sound funny, but Webkit is not responsible for processing Content-Encodings.
All the network thingy are actually done in libcurl (IIUC).
So, when libcurl gets Brotli encoding support, WebKit, hopefully, will have it as well.

[Brady Eidson]

(In reply to comment #3)
> That might sound funny, but Webkit is not responsible for processing
> Content-Encodings.

This is true.

> All the network thingy are actually done in libcurl (IIUC).

This is not true for all platforms.

> So, when libcurl gets Brotli encoding support, WebKit, hopefully, will have
> it as well.

If/when libcurl gets it, platforms that use libcurl will get it.

[Michael Catanzaro]

(In reply to Eugene Klyuchnikov from comment #3)
> So, when libcurl gets Brotli encoding support, WebKit, hopefully, will have
> it as well.

The curl network backend is only used by WinCairo, which is not actually used by anybody except as a basis for proprietary WebKit ports. So you're probably not interested in it. It was abandoned for a long time, but now it's being maintained by Sony.

The other backends are libsoup (used by WebKitGTK+ and WPE) and Core Foundation (for macOS, iOS, and Apple Windows).

The details of where brotli support has to be implemented will vary for each of the three different network ports. E.g. for libsoup the current plan is to not support brotli in libsoup itself, due to limited adoption, so it may have to be implemented in WebKit if that plan does not change. That's https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788418.

[Brent Fulgham]

The fix for this issue was needed outside the WebKit project, therefore this is being resolved as 'Moved'.

This should now be fixed in shipping software.

Brotli is indeed available in Safari on all platforms.