memes

Not sure, but thy might. They’re constantly looking for ways to reduce traffic by even a couple bytes. They claim their servers see something like 30% of all web traffic, so if they can squeeze even a few bytes more out of something then it can have a pretty big impact overall.

One other thing they recently rolled out is a similar form of transparent support for Brotli compression. Many websites, CDN’s, etc. will automatically compress fonts, JavaScript, etc. using gzip if the client browser supports it (and most do). Brotli is a newer compression algorithm that sometimes is better than gzip, but not always. Many browsers now support Brotli as an option along with gzip, so Akamai will transparently convert gzipped items to Brotli, and if it generates a smaller file then they’ll serve that version to browsers that support it.