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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

Summary: the author is worried about Brotli compression (like existing gzip but 20% better) for HTTP protocol. Both Firefox and Chrome require HTTPS for Brotli; but Pale Moon authors disagree and enable Brotli even on plain HTTP connections.

Unfortunately, Cloudfare sides with Firefox and Chrome and does not offer Brotli on HTTP, citing old studies of proxies breaking when exposed to Brotli. They are also telling the author to go away in corporate-speak. The author, however, is unsatisfied and asks:

> What is the real (undisclosed to me) reason they won't consider even the possibility of Brotli being enabled for clients who support it? ... I can only conclude there's some agenda here that I'm being kept in the dark about...

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Unfortunately, I'll indeed slide with FF and Chroke here, because we attempted a plaintext h2 (that was 2015, where HTTPS awareness are becoming mainstream) and unless you bothered to put it into another port it just unpredictably stops due to proxies mangling it.

In an internal study (in an enterprise level) and assuming this is HTTP/1.1, that some proxies will either cache only brotli and made it inaccesible to gzip-only clients (even when you bothered with Vary, because they're plain broken in that regard) or just barf with it and time-out not only that particular request but crash a proxy.

The problem for large-scale deployment is that there are transparent proxies in Timbuktu (literally) since data is not cheap there, they need to use HTTP proxies to compress that, not to mention dial-up users in the US! (Good luck, Verizon!)

And what could that agenda possibly be? That they really like encryption and think everyone should use it? They haven't exactly been shy about telling people that.

Or is Moonchild suggesting that Cloudflare is specifically trying to damage Pale Moon by not supporting its unique feature of Brotli over HTTP? That seems unlikely, insofar as it would require them to have an opinion one way or the other about a browser that nobody uses.

> We've [...] helped them grow and become known through positive posts, blog entries and the likes. [...] seen/helped them grow to become one of the largest CDNs.

Sounds to me like they overestimate they own importance to CF a bit.

Ah, so it’s just a post about some company with a god complex, complaining.

Nothing to see here.

Thanks for saving a click

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