Presently, the Brotli compression format is among the many most generally used. Cloudflare is now rolling out a brand new possibility based mostly on Zstandard (zstd) compression that has solely been supported within the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox internet browsers since March of this yr.
“Zstandard offers 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 mentioned.
Howdy (encrypted) world
Privateness enhancements are additionally a key focus for Cloudflare, and that’s the place the brand new Encrypted Shopper Howdy (ECH) specification matches in. This characteristic addresses a longstanding privateness concern in internet looking. ECH is a proposed IETF standard that’s at the moment present process overview.
“One of many methods through which internet looking isn’t non-public is that your internet browser goes and connects to your web site and declares what it’s on the lookout for in what’s referred to as the consumer hi there,” Graham-Cumming defined. “The answer to that could be a factor referred to as Encrypted Shopper Howdy.”
ECH encrypts the preliminary “Shopper Howdy” packet within the TLS handshake, which reveals the area the consumer is attempting to hook up 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 consumer is trying up.
The important thing distinction is that Encrypted Shopper Howdy 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 goal to enhance consumer privateness by encrypting completely different elements of the online looking course of.
