News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The feature supported in IE6, but not Chrome by mmahemoff on Thursday August 23, 2012 @08:10AM (#4421911)
Compressing an already-compressed file can make it bigger due to metainfo and the fact the gzip algorithm isn't optimised as well for images as say, jpeg. Furthermore, it's an unnecessary performance overhead on both server and browser (even regular compression is sometimes undesirable for this reason).

I guess the browsers figure it's not worth building in support for a feature that's rarely used and creates a sub-optimal UX.

Re:The feature supported in IE6, but not Chrome by andreasvc on Thursday August 23, 2012 @08:35AM (#4421992)
It's not a matter of optimization. Compression removes redundancy. A compressed file will have very little redundancy, so compressing it again is largely a waste of CPU cycles. This is supported by mathematical principles (cf. information theory).
Re:The feature supported in IE6, but not Chrome by colanderman on Thursday August 23, 2012 @09:38AM (#4422250)
> Compressing an already-compressed file can make it bigger due to metainfo

That's not why, that's just a reason why doing so is silly.

> the gzip algorithm isn't optimised as well for images as say, jpeg.

gzip is used in PNG.

Read the article; the reason is because he wasn't sending gzip data, just deflate data.