Brotli can indeed utilize user-defined dictionaries to enhance its compression capabilities. This feature allows Brotli to achieve better compression ratios, especially when the dictionary is tailored to the specific content being compressed. Shared compression dictionaries can significantly improve the efficiency of Brotli by including common patterns or terms that frequently appear in the data, which helps in reducing the overall size of the compressed output.
Regarding the comparison between Brotli and Zstandard (Zstd) in terms of compression ratios for specific datasets like Wikipedia, Brotli generally achieves higher compression ratios than Zstd, particularly for text-based content. For example, Brotli is known to compress HTML files around 20% smaller and JavaScript files about 15% smaller compared to Gzip, and it often outperforms Zstd in terms of compression density for similar datasets.
However, while Brotli may provide better compression ratios, Zstd is typically faster in bo