Gzip

Gzip may refer to any of the following:

1. Short for GNU zip, Gzip is a compression tool on Unix-like systems that use the GNU command line tools. It was developed by Jean-Loup Gaily and Mark Alder and released on October 31, 1992. Files compressed with gzip usually contain the file name extension .gz.

2. With HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and content-encoding, HTTP/1.1 introduced gzip as a way for a web server to compress content before sending it to the visitor. Using gzip, a page loads faster because of the smaller size and can reduce overall bandwidth costs.

For example, this web page is 7.65 KB in size, and the gzipped version of this page is 2.47 KB (a data savings of 67.71%). If this example was multiplied by hundreds of thousands of pages, you can understand how it helps. This example is also only the .htm file, which does not include any external .CSS files to be gzipped.

If you're running Apache for your web server, gzip has been replaced by the deflate mod. To enable deflate on Apache servers, add the below code to your .htaccess file.

#Compress text, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and XML
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
#Remove browser bugs
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent

Compress, Computer abbreviations, GNU, HTTP, Internet terms, Software terms, Tarball, Web design terms