Gzip may refer to any of the following:

  1. Short for GNU zip, Gzip is a compression tool on Unix-like systems which 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. When referring to HTTP 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 also 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If you’re running Apache for your webserver, gzip has been replaced by the deflate mod.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

  • How to extract or decompress a compressed file.
  • How to test and check a web page for errors.