Presently, the Brotli compression format is among the many most generally used. Cloudflare is now rolling out a brand new choice primarily based on Zstandard (zstd) compression that has solely been supported within the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox internet browsers since March of this yr.
“Zstandard provides just about the identical compression ranges of Brotli, however is about 42% sooner than Brotli, and so it truly makes it viable to be utilizing it at fairly a large scale,” he stated.
Whats up (encrypted) world
Privateness enhancements are additionally a key focus for Cloudflare, and that’s the place the brand new Encrypted Consumer Whats up (ECH) specification matches in. This function addresses a longstanding privateness concern in internet looking. ECH is a proposed IETF commonplace that’s presently present process evaluate.
“One of many methods wherein internet looking isn’t personal is that your internet browser goes and connects to your web site and declares what it’s on the lookout for in what’s known as the shopper whats up,” Graham-Cumming defined. “The answer to that may be a factor known as Encrypted Consumer Whats up.”
ECH encrypts the preliminary “Consumer Whats up” packet within the TLS handshake, which reveals the area the person is making an attempt to connect with. Encrypting this packet hides the vacation spot area from anybody monitoring the connection. To be clear, Graham-Cumming famous that ECH is completely different from different privateness efforts like DNS over HTTPS/TLS, which encrypts the DNS lookup course of, in order that the DNS server can not see which domains the person is trying up.
The important thing distinction is that Encrypted Consumer Whats up focuses on hiding the vacation spot area within the preliminary TLS connection, whereas DNS over HTTPS/TLS focuses on hiding the DNS lookups that precede the TLS connection. Each methods intention to enhance person privateness by encrypting completely different elements of the net looking course of.